Written by
Matt T Huber and fist published at Catalyst
The climate
and ecological crisis is dire and there’s little time to address it. In just
over a generation (since 1988), we have emitted half of all historic emissions.1
In this same period the carbon load in the atmosphere has risen from around 350
parts per million to over 410 — the highest level in 800,000 years (the
historic pre-industrial average was around 278).2
Human civilization only emerged in a rare 12,000 year period of climate
stability — this period of stability is ending fast.
The recent
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggests we have a mere
twelve years to drastically lower emissions to avoid 1.5 C warming — a level
that will only dramatically increase the spikes in extreme super-storms,
droughts, wildfires, and deadly heat waves (to say nothing of sea-level rise).3
New studies show changing rainfall patterns will threaten grain production like
wheat, corn, and rice within twenty years.4
A series of three studies suggest as early as 2070, half a billion people will,
“experience humid heat waves that will kill even healthy people in the shade
within 6 hours.”5
You don’t
have to be a socialist to believe the time frame of the required changes will
necessitate a revolution of sorts. The IPCC flatly said we must immediately
institute “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of
society.”6
The noted climate scientist Kevin Anderson said, “… when you really look at the
numbers behind the report, look at the numbers the science comes out with, then
we’re talking about a complete revolution in our energy system. And that is
going to beg very fundamental questions about how we run our economies.”7
The radical
climate movement has long coalesced around the slogan “system change, not
climate change.” The movement has a good understanding that capitalism is the
main barrier to solving the climate crisis.
Yet sometimes the notion of “system
change” is vague on how systems change. The dilemma of the climate crisis is
not as simple as just replacing one system with another — it requires a
confrontation with some of the wealthiest and most powerful sectors of capital
in world history. This includes a mere 100 companies responsible for 71 percent
of the emissions since 1988.8
The fossil fuel industry and other carbon-intensive sectors of capital (steel,
chemicals, cement, etc.) will not sit by and allow the revolutionary changes
that make their business models obsolete.
Like all
other such battles, this confrontation will take a highly organized social
movement with a mass base behind it to force capital and the state to bend to
the changes needed. Yet, as Naomi Klein argues, this is really “bad timing”
because over the last several decades it is capital who has built formidable
power to neutralize their main challenges like a regulatory state, progressive
tax structures, and viable trade unions.9
The history of the nineteenth and twentieth century shows that the largest
challenge to the rule of capital has come from organized working-class
movements grounded in what Adaner Usmani calls “disruptive capacity” —
particularly strikes and union organizing.10
It is the working class that not only constitutes the vast majority of society,
but also has the strategic leverage to shut down capital’s profits from the
inside.11
Yet, herein
lies the main dilemma. A movement up to the task of bringing about the changes
needed will not only have to be massive in size, but have a substantial base in
the working class. In its current form, however, environmental politics has
little chance of succeeding in this. Its ideological and strategic orientation
reflects the worldview of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the
“professional managerial class” that centers educational credentials and
“knowledge” of the reality of environmental crisis at its core.12
This is not simply a problem of the kind of people involved. Middle-class
environmental politics is often directly antagonistic to working-class
interests. It grounds its theories of ecological responsibility in ideas of
“ecological” or “carbon” footprints that blame consumers (and workers) for
driving ecological degradation. This approach centers on the appeal that we
need to live simply and “consume less” — a recommendation that is hardly likely
to appeal to a working class whose wages and living standards have stagnated
for almost two generations.13
When seeking examples of emancipatory environmental politics, radical academics
imagine real environmental politics as a form of direct livelihood struggles
over natural “use values” like land, resources, and the body itself. While
livelihood struggles are very important, professional-class environmentalism
sidesteps how such a politics could appeal to the tens of millions of workers
who do not directly access nature in “use value” form.
In this essay, I argue
for a working-class ecological politics 14
aimed at mobilizing the mass of workers to confront the source of the crisis —
capital. In order to build this kind of politics, we need to appeal to the
mass of the working class who has no ecological means of survival apart from
access to money and commodities.
This politics centers on two major planks.
First, it offers a much different story of class responsibility for the
ecological crisis. Rather than blame “all of us” consumers and our footprints,
it aims its focus on the capitalist class. This kind of politics can channel
already existing anger and resentment workers have toward their boss and the
wealthy in general to explain yet one more reason why those antagonists are
making their lives worse.
Second, it
offers a political program meant to directly appeal to the material interest of
the working class. It is relatively straightforward to insert ecologically
beneficial policies within the already existing movements around the
de-commodification of basic needs like “Medicare for All” or “Housing for All.”
The climate crisis in particular is centered upon sectors absolutely vital to
working-class life — food, energy, transport.
The goal should be to use this
scientifically declared emergency to build a movement to take these critical
sectors under public ownership to at once decarbonize and decommodify them. The
emergent politics of the Green New Deal, although far from perfect, does
exactly this. It not only offers a solution at the scale of the problem —
aiming to revolutionize the energy and economic system — but also offers clear
and direct benefits to the mass of the working class (e.g., a federal job
guarantee).
Although there is much consternation about the
anti-environmentalism amongst established building trade unions and fossil fuel
industrial workers, a working-class environmentalism could better align with
rising militancy in more low-carbon care sectors like health and education.
These campaigns’ focus on anti-austerity politics and “bargaining for the
common good” can also address the expansion of a public response to ecological
breakdown.15
Part 1. From Lifestyle to Livelihood:
The Limits of Environmentalism
The
environmental movement in its current form is dominated by middle-class
professionals. Along with the expansion of higher education, this class
exploded during the post-WWII boom — itself a product of mass working-class
struggle and union victories in the 1930s and 1940s. Out of these historical
conditions emerges what I will call “lifestyle environmentalism,” the essence
of which is to seek better outcomes through individual consumer choices.16
Yet this desire comes from a deeper source of anxiety about the forms of mass
commodity consumption wherein middle-class security is equated with a private
home, automobile, meat consumption, and a whole set of resource- and
energy-intensive commodities. As such, lifestyle environmentalism sees modern
lifestyles — or what is sometimes called “our way of life”17
— as the primary driver of ecological problems. This, of course, makes a
politics of material gains inherently ecologically damaging.
Since lifestyle
environmentalism blames commodity consumption — and the vast majority of
society (i.e., the working class) depends on commodities for survival — it only
appeals to a very narrow base of affluent people who not only live relatively
comfortable middle-class lives but simultaneously feel guilty doing so. Under
neoliberalism especially, the bulk of the population does not feel guilty or
complicit in their consumption, but constrained by severe limits on access to
the basics of survival.
Lifestyle
environmentalism also produces an offshoot, a distinct and seemingly more
radical alternative vision of ecological politics prevalent in academic
scholarship. This form of scholarship accepts the premise of lifestyle
environmentalism that modern “consumer lifestyles” are inherently damaging to
the environment. As such, radical ecological scholars look to the margins of
society for a more authentic basis for environmental politics.
This is what I
will call “livelihood environmentalism,”18
or what is sometimes called “the environmentalism of the poor.”19
This form of scholarship argued the proper basis for environmental mobilization
was a direct lived experience of the environment. I will cover two critical
fields.
First, political ecology broadly seeks examples of struggles over
direct “use value” reliance upon land or resources for subsistence among often
peasant, indigenous, or other marginalized communities (usually in the Global
South).
As such, this scholarship often romanticizes what are seen as
anti-modern subsistence livelihoods on the margins of global capitalism.
Second, environmental justice focuses more on the uneven effects of pollution
and toxic waste as deadly threats to livelihood in racialized marginalized
communities (usually in the Global North).
Often critical of mainstream
environmentalism’s focus on wilderness or wildlife preservation, environmental
justice scholars bring to light how poor and racially marginalized communities
make “environment” a question of survival.
Yet, again, those struggling
directly against the poisoning of local communities are often on the margins of
society as a whole. Struggles like this (e.g., the Landless Workers’ Movement
in Brazil or the struggle for clean water in Flint, Michigan) are obviously
important matters of survival for those involved. Yet the strategic question of
how to translate local livelihood concerns into a broader mass environmental
movement able to take on capital remains unclear.
Livelihood
environmentalism is often seen as the opposite of lifestyle environmentalism,
but its academic focus emerges from the foundations of the latter. It is the
disaffection with the mass commodity society that sends the radical academic’s
gaze to the margins of society looking for “real” environmental struggle.
Livelihood environmentalism is indeed a much more attractive form of politics
rooted in the material interests of specific groups. By fetishizing the direct
lived relation to what is seen as the real environment (land, resources,
pollution), it sidesteps how we might build an environmental politics for the
majority of society already dispossessed of land and dependent on money and
commodities for survival.
THE ECOLOGICAL FALLACIES OF LIFESTYLE
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Lifestyle
environmentalism takes life seriously. Ecology is the study of life in all its
relations. To trace environmental problems back to consumer lifestyles,
ecologists developed sophisticated technical tools. They were based on a core
premise:
Every organism, be it bacterium, whale
or person, has an impact on the earth. We all rely upon the products and
services of nature, both to supply us with raw materials and to assimilate our
wastes. The impact we have on our environment is related to the “quantity” of
nature that we use or “appropriate” to sustain our consumption patterns.20
These are the
opening lines of an early introductory text to “ecological footprint” analysis,
Sharing Nature’s Interest. Every year thousands of undergraduates and
environmental activists take the “ecological footprint” quiz to learn how many
planets it would require to sustain the planet’s 7+ billion people consuming
like you (usually some startling number like 3.5 Earths).
Through such
knowledge and tools, consumers in the Global North learned that their
“privilege” and complicity was largely responsible for a global ecological
crisis.
The quote
lays out the ecological worldview nicely: humans are an organism like any
other. Every “organism” has measurable “impacts” on an ecosystem. Bears eat
fish, and humans eat fish tacos, but the results on an ecosystem are the same.
Importantly, ecological footprint analysis seeks to link impacts to
consumption. This makes sense within the ecological worldview. After all, any
ecologist knows an ecosystem is made up of producers and consumers.
These are
quite different than producers and consumers in a capitalist economy.
Ecological producers are the plants that harness solar power and water to
produce organic plant matter at the base of any “food web.” However, the real
action — and the “impacts” — comes from ecological consumers. These are the
animals and other species who consume plants and the animals who consume those
animals and so on.
The consumers — and there are many levels of primary,
secondary, and so on — are the drivers of ecological change in a system where
producers are relatively inert and passive (they are actually called
“autotrophs”).
An ecological
footprint can take the input of your various economic consumptive activity (the
energy, food, housing, and other materials that make up your daily consumption)
and give you an output of how much ecological space — or, “equivalent
biologically productive area”21
— is required to support this consumption.
This allows for an understanding of
inequality rooted in income and consumption levels: the US consumes 9.6
hectares per capita while India consumes 1 hectare per capita. This broad
ecological footprint analysis has been supplanted recently with “carbon
footprints.” Instead of measuring your impact in terms of “space,” now
consumers learn in terms of pounds (or tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent
emissions (the average American consumer emits roughly 37,000 pounds per year).
This can lead
to a kind of “progressive” analysis of the inequality of footprints between
rich and poor consumers. In 2015, Oxfam released a report entitled “Extreme
Carbon Inequality” that found the top 10 percent of people in the world are
responsible for 50 percent of emissions while the bottom 50 percent are only
responsible for 10 percent.22
The abstract announces the project in terms of “Comparing the average lifestyle
consumption footprints of richer and poorer citizens in a range of countries.”23
Here again emissions are attached to “lifestyle”; the way we live generates
emissions that are our own individual responsibility. In fact, the study
asserts that 64 percent of total emissions are wholly attributable to
“consumption” whereas the remainder is vaguely ascribed to “governments,
investments (e.g. in infrastructure) and international transport.”24
Yet the
question becomes: is an individual consumer’s “footprint” all their own? The
difference between humans and other organisms is that no other organism
monopolizes the means of production and forces some of those organisms to work
for money.
If we saw a bear privatize the means of fish production and force
other bears to work for them, we would immediately conclude something had gone
wrong in this ecosystem. But this is what humans do to other human organisms.
Humans organize access to resources (and consumption) via class systems of
control and exclusion.
Footprint analyses
are not only shaped by an ecological vision of “all humans are simply
organism-consumers” — but also a more hegemonic economic theory that suggests
it is consumers who drive the economy with their choices and decisions. The
theory of consumer sovereignty assumes that producers are captive to the
demands of consumers, indeed that they are simply responding to the latter —
rather than what is in fact the case: production constrains consumption
choices.
Much consumption (like driving) is not a “choice” but a necessity of
social reproduction (getting to work). Moreover, when we choose commodities, we
can only choose those that are profitable to produce in the first place. A
contradiction of “environmentally sustainable” commodities (with lower
footprints) is they are often are more expensive.
The real
question one must ask is: who do we believe has the real power over society’s
economic resources? Consumer sovereignty theory suggests it is consumer
preferences that ultimately drive production decisions — power is diffuse and
scattered amongst individual consumers.
But in fact, power over the economy is
not diffuse, but concentrated in the hands of those who control productive
resources. Footprint ideology internalizes the former view of diffused consumer
power. One leading analyst of carbon inequality, Kevin Ummel, reveals this is
exactly how he imagines the causal relationship: “The goal is to trace
emissions back to the household consumption choices that ultimately led to
their production.”25
The core insight
of ecological footprint analysis is that consumption choices — that is,
lifestyles — are driving the ecological crisis. The conclusion is clear: a
politics of less consumption. As the footprint book quoted above puts it, “We
live in shrinking world. The inescapable conclusion is that we must learn to
live a quality life with less.”26
While the whole point of footprint analysis is to reveal hidden environmental
impacts embedded in consumption, other scholars sought a more authentic basis
for environmental politics in a direct lived relationship to the environment.
LIVELIHOOD ENVIRONMENTALISM AND
MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES
Ecological
footprint ideology made a politics of material gains impermissible among those
who gained their living from commodities. Since consumer lifestyles were
associated with a footprint, more consumption meant more ecological
destruction. Taken to its extreme any class demand for, say, higher wages would
necessarily mean a higher “footprint.”27
Environmental politics became — by design — a politics of limits and less.
Thus, the overwhelming focus of environmental politics shifted to examine the
kinds of relations that could be built on the terrain of use value — cordoned
off from capitalism and the commodity society. This explains the rise of “Small
is Beautiful” –style environmentalism in the 1970s which celebrated all that is
local, small-scale, and based on direct face-to-face cooperative work relations
with minimal (and “appropriate”) technology.28
This form of politics promised what Erik Olin Wright called “escaping
capitalism,” or projects where the goal is to “create our own micro-alternative
in which to live and flourish.”29
If consumer lifestyles were to blame, authentic environmental politics could
only be built in separation from this mass commodity society.
Many radicals
of the New Left saw the limits of “Small is Beautiful” communes and the “Whole
Earth Catalog” form of lifestyle politics. For a set of academics concerned
with radical politics, combining interest in material demands (i.e., class)
with ecology meant focusing on struggles on the margins of the global commodity
society.
Radical academics sought ecological politics on the terrain of use
value: those directly appropriating their livelihood from nature or those whose
own use value of labor power — bodily health— was directly imperiled by
pollution. Thus, the two most popular radical approaches to ecological politics
in academia centered on two approaches: political ecology and environmental
justice.30
The sub-discipline
of political ecology emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a Marxist offshoot of
agrarian studies. It aimed to situate the struggles of poor rural populations
(peasants, indigenous peoples, etc.) over land, resources, and environmental
degradation within a Marxist political-economic framework. Piers Blaikie and
Harold Brookfield’s Land Degradation and Society sought to analyze the,
“constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and
also within classes and groups in society itself.”31
The starting point of their analysis was the category of the “land manager” —
usually a peasant household with some degree of control over “use values” such
as land and subsistence.
Emblematic of
the approach was the volume Liberation Ecologies (edited by Richard Peet and
Michael Watts) — its 1996 edition was quickly followed by a second 2004 edition
with revised and new cases.32
The cases all centered around place-based struggles for land and resources:
soil degradation in Bolivia, deforestation in Madagascar, the Chipko “tree
hugging” movement in India.
One highly insightful aspect of this approach is
its critical posture toward a kind of imperial environmentalism — attempting to
impose ideas of pristine nature in ways that displace local communities. The
goal was to often show that land degradation like deforestation or soil erosion
should not be blamed on peasants themselves but by larger processes of
marginalization wrought by global commodity flows and forms of state control.
The central
focus of this work came to be centered on the concept of livelihoods 33
— communities who derived their sustenance directly from the land to some
degree. Given the dynamics of global neoliberal capitalism, the key research
finding of this approach focuses on dispossession of local communities from
their traditional livelihood strategies.
Marx called this process “primitive
accumulation” but when David Harvey coined the term “accumulation by
dispossession,” a new wave of scholarship emerged to focus intently on the manifold
processes of dispossession occurring for land-based cultures and communities
the world over.34
So ecological research in this vein meant research among local communities and
cultures resisting the slow engulfment of peasant and other traditional societies
into a global capitalist commodity system.
Yet, because capitalism is itself
defined by the fact that the mass majority is already dispossessed of the means
of production, such scholarship remained about the the margins and periphery of
the global economy.
The other
hugely popular radical academic literature is environmental justice.
Environmental justice also suggests a direct lived experience of the
environment is a key basis for environmental struggle — in this case, the
embodied exposure to toxic hazards and pollution.
The use values under threat
here include water, air, and, of course, that critical use value of bodily
labor power. In an industrial society, the infrastructure and waste of
industrialism are sited in marginalized communities, often of color. As such,
environmental justice examines injustices at the intersection of race and class
and the struggles to overcome them.35
With its
roots in the Civil Rights Movement, environmental justice emerged to tackle the
uneven distribution of toxic pollution dumped in communities of color
throughout the United States. In 1983, the black residents of Warren County,
North Carolina used tactics of civil disobedience to fight the siting of a PCB
toxic waste dump.36
In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice released a
report called Toxic Waste and Race in the United States detailing the
statistical overlaps between marginalized racial groups and toxic waste and
other environmental hazards.37
In 1991, indigenous peoples, African American leaders, and others staged the
First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit declaring, “to
begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to
fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby
re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother
Earth.”38
In February 1994, President Clinton passed an executive order, “to address
environmental justice in minority populations and low-income populations.”
This
historical narrative is often meant to explain the rise to prominence of the
environmental justice movement (although below I will question how successful
this movement has been). The underlying political focus is that it is these
marginalized communities themselves that should lead environmental movements
against the corporations poisoning them and their communities. It is their
direct material experience with pollution and toxicity which grants them this
special political status.
Similarly, as environmental justice struggles have
informed the climate movement, the climate justice movement also sees
marginalized “front line” communities as the key actors in the climate
struggle. Like political ecology, this is often the peasants, indigenous
peoples, and other communities most imperiled by climate change (e.g., coastal
fishermen, drought-prone farmers, etc.).
Yet how does environmental justice
politics build solidarity with the majority of people who are fully engulfed
within the commodity society, but not exposed to any apparent threat of toxic
pollution?
THE LIMITS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
The rise of
the environmental movement comes at a time of historic defeat for the Left. It
is time to question if its politics are symptomatic of this defeat. The first key
shortcoming is rooted in its understanding of class responsibility for the
ecological crisis. The form of politics informed by ecological footprint
analysis takes a political approach that blames all consumers for the
ecological crisis.
It is hard to see how a political strategy can win if its
solution is to demand a further restriction on consumption by a class which has
been struggling with wage stagnation for almost a half-century. How does it
plan to attract working people to its cause if its main message to them is to
accept further austerity?
Ecological
footprint presents an analysis where all impacts can be traced back to the
organisms (humans) who derive useful properties from those resources
(consumers). But it is a view that construes the power equation in reverse
order. By making consumers wholly responsible for their consumptive “impact,”
this perspective ignores the critical role of capital, which constrains both
the kind, and the quantity, of goods that are thrown into the market.
The gasoline
in your tank flowed through the hands of innumerable people seeking profit —
oil-exploration technology consultants, production companies, rig-service
firms, pipeline companies, gas station operators — yet you are the one
responsible for the “footprint” simply because you pressed the gas leading to
the emissions?
When it comes to consumption, every commodity has users and
profiteers along the chain: we should place the bulk of responsibility on those
profiting from production — not simply people fulfilling their needs.
This is
not a moral calculus as much as an objective assessment of who has the power
along these commodity chains. Of course, we don’t want to completely ignore the
responsibility of those few wealthy consumers who buy fuel-inefficient cars,
eat steak twice a week, and fly excessively. But why do we only focus on their
consumption as the proper zone of responsibility and politics?
A better
question would be to ask how these consumers became so wealthy in the first
place. Why are those work activities — those choices — not similarly subject to
political critique and concern?
Take the
problem of climate change. Richard Heede’s work traces 63 percent of all
historical carbon emissions since the industrial revolution to ninety private
and state corporations — what he calls “the carbon majors,” the class of
capitalists who dig up fossil fuel and sell it for profit.39
But the capitalists responsible for climate change are much broader than this.
There are vast amounts of industrial capital dependent upon fossil fuel
consumption — the most climate-relevant include cement (responsible for 7
percent of global carbon emissions), steel, chemicals, and other
carbon-intensive forms of production.40
According to the Energy Information Agency, the industrial sector consumes more
of the world’s energy than the residential, commercial, and transportation
sectors combined.41
If we include emissions from electricity consumption, the industrial sector
exceeds all others (including agriculture and land-use change) with 31 percent
of global emissions.42
Many social critics would label an attention to factories and industrial
“points of production” as hopelessly orthodox, but for climate change and other
ecological problems they remain the belly of the beast.
The second
main shortcoming is the academic retreat from lifestyle politics to the
privileging of livelihood environmentalism. This has less to do with who is
blamed, and more with where in society one locates authentic environmental
struggles. Here the problem is a political focus on marginality which will not
produce a more broadly based movement. Political ecology is fixated on
struggles over dispossession in rural areas, including indigenous and peasant
resistance.
Any decent person would also support these movements for justice
and self-determination, and we cannot downplay the importance of these
struggles. I merely question how such struggles might build a kind of social
power capable of taking on capital, which is responsible for the dispossession
and pollution in the first place.
The defining feature of capitalism is the
vast majority are torn from the natural conditions of life — those not yet
dispossessed are by definition marginal to the system as a whole. By placing
direct livelihood experience of environmental resources as the only basis for
politics, you severely limit the kind of political base you can build.
One can also
legitimately raise strategic questions about movement success with
environmental justice . It is instructive to examine some key insider
scholar-activists’ own reflections on the movement. In the year after Clinton’s
historic executive order, Benjamin Goldman — a data analyst for the famous 1987
Toxic Waste and Race report — argued that the actual power of the environmental
justice movement was akin to “a gnat on the elephant’s behind.”43
He updated the data from the 1987 report to show that “Despite the increased
attention to the issue, people of color in the United States are now even more
likely than whites to live in communities with commercial hazardous waste
facilities than they were a decade ago.”44
Twenty-five years later, Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton come to a similar conclusion
and cautiously call out the “failure” of environmental justice. They flatly
state: “… poor communities and communities of color are still overexposed to
environmental harms.”45
For Goldman,
the celebration of environmental justice politics misses the larger context of
political defeat:
… [A]s progressives have applauded the
emergence of the environmental justice movement, we have witnessed a period of
the most awesome intensification in inequality, and, ultimately, a historically
significant triumph for the rulers of transnational capital who have further
consolidated their power, fortunes, and global freedoms.46
Goldman
concludes that for the environmental justice movement to counter this corporate
power it would need to, “… broaden its populist constituency to include more
diverse interests.”47
Yet the appeal of the environmental justice movement for many progressives is,
of course, it represents a struggle among the poorest and marginalized groups
in capitalist society — low-income communities of color.
Again, these struggles
are hugely important and must not be ignored. But for environmental justice struggles
to win, they must find a way to build a broader environmental movement with a
base able to actually take on the corporations responsible for poisoning local
communities. Thus far, we tend to validate the moral high ground of such
struggles, without strategically asking how they might build power to overcome
their situation.
Pulido et al.
raise the question of the state. While the state often pays “lip service” to
environmental justice concerns, it often fails to enforce regulations that
would directly improve peoples’ lives.48
They argue for a more confrontational strategy:
Instead of seeing the state as a
helpmate or partner, it needs to see the state as an adversary and directly
challenge it…. It’s not about being respectable, acknowledged, and included.
It’s about raising hell for both polluters and the agencies that protect them.49
In the
context of neoliberal state capture (and Trump), this is obviously the correct
strategy. But, in the long run, the environmental justice movement could also
think about a broader strategy that could build popular left power within the
state itself (more on this in part 3). Such a politics would need to go beyond
marginality and speak to what Goldman called “diverse interests.”
In sum, both
lifestyle and its offshoot, livelihood environmentalism have emerged in the
very period in which the environmental crisis has only worsened and private
capital’s capacity to harm the environment has vastly expanded. Their political
strategies are ineffective. We now turn to diagnose this ineffectiveness in
more explicit historical and class terms.
Part 2. “Overshoot”: The Class Basis
of Environmentalism
The
environmental movement emerged during a period of crisis and restructuring in
the 1960s and 1970s. While the politics of anticapitalism historically railed
against the system’s inequality and poverty, by the 1970s commentators on both
the Left and Right agreed capitalism faced a new problem: affluence.
We simply
had too much. Rising consumption levels — themselves the product of
working-class victories — were now a problem. In the mid-seventies, a young
Alan Greenspan argued economic crisis was rooted in overly “ambitious” societal
expectations: “… governments strongly committed themselves to ameliorate social
inequalities at home and abroad and to achieve an ever rising standard of
living.
However morally and socially commendable, these commitments proved to
be too ambitious in economic terms — both in what they actually attempted to
achieve as well as in the expectations they raised among the public.”50
He went on to suggest this public must adjust to new “realistic goals” and
that, “levels of income will be lower and the possible growth in standards of
living will be reduced.” Society had “overshot” reasonable expectations. The
solution? Austerity, or a politics of less.
From a much
different political perspective, much of the “New Left” also turned its
critique toward the problems of an affluent commodity society. Herbert Marcuse
defined “pure domination … as administration, and in the overdeveloped areas of
mass consumption, the administered life becomes the good life for the whole …”51
Guy Debord asserted, “The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of
commodities” and that the commodity has “succeeded in totally colonizing social
life.”52
Critical theorist William Leiss argued consumer lifestyles did not satisfy
fundamental human needs:
“This setting promotes a lifestyle that is dependent
upon an endlessly rising level of consumption of material goods … [in which]
individuals are led to misinterpret the nature of their needs.”53
Christopher Lasch lampooned the American “cult of consumption” and the
“propaganda of commodities” in ways that directly influenced President Jimmy
Carter’s so-called “malaise speech” in which he claimed Americans, “tend to
worship self-indulgence and consumption.”54
Most agree the speech admonishing Americans to scale down paved the way for
Reagan.
These
critiques of affluence came at an odd time during a decade in which American
workers were under attack. As historian Daniel Horowitz explains, “most
Americans experienced [the 1970s] as one of economic pain … the vast majority
of the nation’s families experienced diminishing real incomes.”55
Polls reported the rising cost of living was the number one concern for
Americans (in a decade with no shortage of concerns).56
In a context where the working class struggled to afford the basics of life
many on the Left and Right told them they already had too much. As the
Greenspans of the world won out, it became common sense that it was time to “do
more with less”; it was time to cut — government spending, union benefits, and,
household budgets alike.
The critique
of affluence and “overconsumption” overlapped perfectly with the rise of the
ecology movement at precisely the same moment. Much like Greenspan, the Club of
Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth announced a new reality to which society had to
adjust: “man is forced to take account of the limited dimensions of his
planet.”57
Paul Ehrlich initially trumpeted the crudest Malthusianism in The Population
Bomb, but a few years later, in 1974, he and his wife published The End of
Affluence, arguing that the mass consumer society had overshot its material
base.58
One of the most influential texts was William Catton’s Overshoot, which
explained how human resource use had “overshot” the carrying capacity of the
Earth and mass die-off was imminent.59
Environmental politics rose and expanded precisely during the period of
neoliberal restraint. It subscribed to what Leigh Phillips terms an “austerity
ecology” — a politics of limits, reducing consumption, and lessening our impact
— reduce, reuse, recycle.60
It is in this
context where the strange division between a “class” and “environmental”
politics is rooted. A “new social movement,” environmentalism rejected a
politics rooted in material interests as hopelessly linked to the hollow
materialism of the commodity society. Whereas a class politics was always about
offering a vision of increased overall welfare, ecological politics became a
politics of less. André Gorz developed an explicitly eco-socialist standpoint
centered on less:
“The only way to live better is to produce less, to consume
less, to work less, to live differently.”61
Over the years class and environmental politics were constantly at odds in the
“jobs versus environment” debate. It was working-class loggers who opposed the
protection of the spotted owl or the restoration of salmon runs in the Columbia
River. As Richard White recounts, the bumper sticker “Are you an
Environmentalist or do you Work for a Living?” became popular among rural
working-class communities.62
While many working-class people were indeed hostile to elite environmentalism,
this went both ways. Green politicians also blamed privileged workers for their
consumption. Rudolph Baro, of the Green Party in Germany, plainly said: “The
working class here [in the West] is the richest lower class in the world …. I
must say that the metropolitan working class is the worst exploiting class in
history.”63
Many parts of
the eco-left today still call for a politics of less. In 2018, the New Left
Review published a piece by Troy Vettese that argued for austerity — or what he
called “egalitarian eco-austerity” that aims to divide the less stuff equally.
The article advocates, among other things, turning over half the planet to wild
nature — an idea he takes from the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson — universal
veganism, and an abstract plan for global per-capita energy rationing.64
Perhaps the most popular strand on the eco-left today is the program of
“degrowth” defined in a recent compilation as “an equitable downscaling of
production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and
raw materials.”65
Degrowth proponents are quick to insist they don’t’ want this to appear like a
politics of “less” because they are calling for the redistribution of less
stuff more equally and calling for more immaterial resources like time,
community, and relationships.
Yet, this program’s obsession with overall
material throughput and gdp growth — itself a statistical construction that
obscures precisely who benefits from growth in a capitalist economy — fails to
take into account that the vast majority of people in capitalist societies also
need more material stuff. The experience of the neoliberal period has been
defined for most by stagnant incomes/wages, increasing debt, eroding jobs security,
and longer working hours.
By centering its entire political program on the
prefix of “de” and talk of “reductions,” degrowth has little capacity to speak
to the needs of the vast majority of workers ravaged by neoliberal austerity.66
A class analysis would always be premised on not the aggregate of society (and
whether or not it needs to grow or degrow), but rather conflictual class
divisions where a few have way too much and the majority have too little.
What explains
the nexus of ecology and a politics of less? One thing that unites these
austerity perspectives — from Alan Greenspan to degrowth — is that they emerge
from a specific class formation mentioned above, “the professional-managerial
class,” and what I will call, for simplicity, the professional class.67
This class formation expanded rapidly in the postwar era through the dramatic
expansion of higher education. It is radical academics, natural scientists,
nonprofit managers, government workers, journalists, and other professionals who
conclude modern lifestyles are to blame for our ecological crisis. Ironically,
it is the professional class’s own relative material security that induces this
rather guilt-ridden conviction that “all of us” consumers are at the root of
the problem.
THE PROFESSIONAL CLASS: KNOWING
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
In 1976,
Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s controversial concept of the
“professional-managerial class” was an attempt to take account of the dramatic
rise in so-called white-collar occupations in an increasingly postindustrial
knowledge economy.68
On the one hand, they were attempting take account of the central role of
“middle-class radicalism” in shaping the “New Left” politics prominent at the
time.69
In broader terms, they argued “the enormous expansion of higher education” had
created, “a new stratum of educated wage earners … impossible for Marxists to
ignore.”70
They entered a debate among many Marxists on how to theorize the class location
of such knowledge workers. Given their lack of ownership of the means of
production — and reliance upon wages or salaries for survival — André Gorz and
Serge Mallet called them the “new working class.”71
Nicos Poulantzas called them the “new petty bourgeoisie” and argued the
traditional class cleavages between mental and manual workers applied.72
Erik Olin Wright argued we should acknowledge the “contradictory class
locations” of many professional occupations.73
Regardless of how we theorize them, a key point is that the professional class
is a minority of the population. Kim Moody estimates professionals make up 22
percent of the employed population in the United States (another 14 percent are
categorized in “managerial” occupations).74
He claims the working class represents 63 percent.
I do not aim
to resolve these theoretical debates here. For my purposes, I want to emphasize
the centrality of knowledge, and more broadly, educational credentials to
professional-class life. Poulantzas explained this in terms of education and
the making of a “career”: “the role of these educational levels is far more
important for circulation within the new petty bourgeoisie (the ‘promotion’ of
its agents, and their ‘careers’, etc.), than it is for the working class.”75
The centrality of educational credentials means the professional class not only
subscribes to the myth of “meritocracy,” but also elevate the individualized
capacity to impact the world — whether that is in terms of achieving a “career”
or virtuously lowering your carbon footprint. Educational levels and
credentials are not only central to professional-class life experiences but
serve as a ticket toward a more material aspiration for a “middle class” life
of cars, home ownership, kids, and financial security.
Yet, while the
professional class aspires to these banal aspects of middle-class security,
they are often simultaneously reviled by it. Through exposure to elite
education, many in the professional class come to think deeply about both the
alienation and destruction inherent in the mass commodity society. This
inward-looking guilt is often at the root of professional-class politics.
The politics
of ecology emerged from this professional class. By the 1960s, the ecology
movement not only proposed a particular kind of politics against environmental
destruction, but also a mode of critique which situates knowledge and science
at the core of struggle. Today this is fundamentally how climate politics is
presented — a battle between those who “believe” and those who “deny” the
science. This has historical roots as the ecology movement always situated
scientific knowledge — credentials — at the center of ecological politics.
In
1972, the Ecologist ran a cover story called “A Blueprint for Survival,” which
claimed a specific politics of authority rooted in credentials: “This document has
been drawn up by a small team of people, all of whom, in different capacities,
are professionally involved in the study of global environmental problems.”76
The more famous 1972 Limits to Growth also enacted the same vision of politics
— that a team of researchers can study and thus know the true extent of
ecological crisis. The foreword claims, “It is the predicament of mankind that
man can perceive the problematique, yet, despite his considerable knowledge and
skills, he does not understand the origins, significance, and
interrelationships of its many components and thus is unable to devise
effective responses.”77
The central
tenet of such ecological knowledge systems is an analysis rooted in
relationality — or the assertion, as Barry Commoner put it, “everything is
connected to everything else.”78
Although early ecological studies only aimed to study the relations among
non-human organisms, the ecological movement was based in the assertion that
humans must be studied in their deep interrelationships with the natural world.
A classic ecological text of the 1970s, William Ophuls’s Ecology and the
Politics of Scarcity, lays out the core of an ecological critique of “our way
of life”:
… due to man’s ignorance of nature’s
workings, he has done so in a particularly destructive fashion … we must learn
to work with nature and to accept the basic ecological trade-offs between
protection and production … this will necessarily require major changes in our
life … for the essential message of ecology limitation: there is only so much
the biosphere can take and only so much it can give, and this may be less than
we desire …79
If we knew
the deep interrelations of our impacts on the biosphere, then we would truly
understand the need for limitation. By focusing on “our life” it is clear where
he thinks the limits should be placed: consumer lifestyles.
Now, a
politics based upon “relationality” could have easily connected the dots in a
way that pointed toward the culprits in the capitalist class who control
production for profit. This form of analysis would yield a politics based on
conflict and an inherent antagonism between capitalists and the mass of society
over ecological survival. However, the knowledge associated with ecologies of
“interdependence” did not point in this direction. This form of ecological
relational knowledge leads directly to the ecological footprint analysis
reviewed above.
This turn
toward lifestyles and mutual guilt easily converged with the efforts of the
business sector to reshape the more radical strains of the environmental
movement. In the wake of the huge regulatory challenges to industry posed by
the Clean Air and Water Acts — and widespread public belief that business was
causing the environmental crisis — corporations devised massive public
relations efforts to green their image.80
Historian Joe Conley explains:
The goals of these programs ranged
from deflecting criticism of environmental impacts and forestalling new
environmental laws to promoting voluntary alternatives to regulation and
gaining market share among ecologically-conscious consumers.81
Moreover,
some corporations actively promoted the idea that environmental stewardship
should be the individual consumer’s — not industry’s — responsibility. For
example, perhaps the quintessential example of consumer action is recycling.
Historian Ted Steinberg recounts the story of how industry groups like beer and
soft drink manufactures — along with aluminum and plastics companies —
organized to defeat a national bottle bill which would force industry to pay
the cost of recycling.82
They preferred public municipal recycling programs that place the
responsibility on individual households to sort and recycle their waste. More
perniciously, they vigorously promoted the idea that individual consumers were
themselves the cause of pollution. He quotes an official from the American
Plastics Council saying, “If I buy a product, I’m the polluter. I should be
responsible for the disposal of the package.”83
This is the logic of “ecological footprints” transferred to plastic bottles.
Poulantzas
argued the professional class — or the “new petty bourgeoisie” — can shift back
and forth from bourgeois and proletarian class positions. “These
petty-bourgeois groupings can often ‘swing’ according to the conjuncture,
sometimes in a very short space of time, from a proletarian to a bourgeois
class position and vice versa.”84
This section argued much of the professional class has adapted political
strategies that align with capital’s decades-long insistence on austerity. But
Poulantzas insists that “this ‘oscillation’ should not be taken as a natural or
essential feature of the petty bourgeoisie, but refers to its situation in the
class struggle.”85
In a time of renewed working-class militancy and resurgent socialist politics,
what would an environmental politics from a working-class perspective look
like?
Part 3. Working-Class Ecological Politics
For the
environmental movement to expand beyond the professional class and establish a
working-class base for itself, it cannot rely on austerity, shaming, and
individualistic solutions as its pillars. It also cannot place so much emphasis
on knowledge of the science (belief or denial). It has to mobilize around
environmentally beneficial policies that appeal to the material interests of
the vast majority of the working class mired in stagnant wages, debt, and job
insecurity.
A working-class environmental program would focus on anti-austerity
politics. One premise might be: humans are ecological beings who have basic
needs to reproduce their lives (food, energy, housing, health care, love,
leisure).
The proletarian reliance upon money and commodities for these basic
needs creates high levels of stress — and excludes huge swathes from meeting
them. Instead of seeing those needs as a source of “footprints” that must be
reduced, we should acknowledge the majority of people in capitalist society
need more and secure access to these basics of survival. To make this political
we need to explain how human needs can be met through ecological principles.
Conveniently,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Sunrise Movement, and new left think tanks like
“New Consensus” have coalesced around demanding a “Green New Deal” that in many
ways attempts to build this kind of working-class environmental politics. The
non-binding resolution proposed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey,
centers inequality and working-class gains.
The resolution emphasizes all the
technical requirements for a massive de-carbonization program, but also offers
“all people of the United States … a job with a family-sustaining wage,
adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.”
Many centrist liberal thinkers have lambasted the Green New Deal because it
folds in broader demands like “Medicare for All” and a federal job guarantee
when the focus should myopically be on climate and de-carbonization. This
couldn’t be more mistaken.
The key is to build a movement where masses of
people connect the dots to see the solutions to all our crises of climate,
health care, and housing require building mass social power to combat the
industries profiting from these very crises.
There is
admirable political vision behind the Green New Deal. But, as of yet, we lack
the kind of political movement that could actually achieve it. The demands of
the Green New Deal require massive concessions from capital. In order to win
such concessions, we need to see the working class as a mass base of social
power and seek to build that power in two primary ways.
First, the most obvious
source of working-class power is simply the fact that they are the majority of
the population (Moody actually estimates 75 percent if we include those doing
care work outside the formal workforce). The Left is already learning that a
key way to build popular mass support from this base is to offer programs based
on the de-commodification of basic needs.86
Many radical ecological thinkers place attention on resistance to the
commodification of nature 87
— or preventing the integration of new “frontier” environments into the
circuits of capital. A working-class ecological politics should focus on the
inverse of this: instead of only resisting the entrance of nature into the
market, we can fight to extricate things people need from the market.
Rather
than focusing on those who have a direct “use value” or livelihood relation to
the environment, this politics takes the working-class dependence on
commodities as a key source of insecurity and exploitation. The recent surge in
socialist electoral politics in the UK, US, and other countries has shown that
these kinds of appeals to peoples’ basic needs can be extremely popular in
societies ravaged by inequality and precariousness.
A Green New
Deal–style de-commodification program is not only meant to appeal to workers’
interests; it could also have tremendous ecological effects. Free public
housing programs could also integrate green building practices that provide
cheaper heating and electricity bills for residents.88
Free public transportation could fundamentally shift the over reliance on
automobiles and other privatized modes of transport.
There is no ethical reason
why we should all agree that “health care is a human right,” but food and
energy are not. With these we confront industries who are the central culprits
in our ecological crisis. Moreover, this program of de-commodification does not
exclude traditional ecological movements for preservation or conservation of
wilderness or “open space.” It is a politics of building and enlarging the zone
of social life where capital is not allowed.
The combination of the Green New
Deal’s “federal job guarantee” with the de-commodification of social needs could
also include the traditional left-labor demand for a shorter workweek since the
total number of work hours could be spread among fewer workers and the basics
of life will simply cost less.89
A Green New
Deal based on de-commodification is also about shifting power and control over
society’s resources. The most ecologically beneficial part of this program is
that it aims to transfer these industries from private to public ownership so
that environmental goals can predominate over profits. For climate change,
there is one sector in particular that could become a critical site of
struggle: electricity.90
A rapid plan of de-carbonization will require a program based on the
“electrification of everything,” including transportation and residential and
commercial heating.91
In the United States context, this not only means “greening” an electric power
sector that is still 62.9 percent powered by fossil fuels (mainly natural gas
and coal), but also massively expanding electric generation to accommodate increased
demand from electrification of other sectors.92
This program will require a massive struggle against the investor-owned private
utility industry. According to one report, this industry only includes 199
private utilities (representing 9 percent of the total number of utilities),
but they service 75 percent of the electric consumer base.93
A rapid decarbonization plan would clearly require placing these 199 companies
under public ownership — and they would not relinquish their guaranteed profits
without a fight.
Because of
its “natural monopoly” status (it only makes sense for one company to handle
provision on a single grid network), the electricity sector is already subject
to intense forms of public regulation and scrutiny. That is, it is a sector
more open to political contestation than others.
Moreover, since electricity is
absolutely central to social reproduction — and because there is already an
existing reservoir of working-class anger at private utilities companies for
exorbitant rates and shutoffs 94
— it would be straightforward to build mass working-class campaigns based on
both the need to rapidly de-carbonize electricity and offer cheaper, even free,
electricity for households. While climate change politics is often abstract —
debating global temperature targets and parts per million in the atmosphere —
masses of workers could easily understand free electricity.
Any
de-commodification and public sector program will also raise the question of how
to “pay” for it. Like the old New Deal, the answer must focus on corporations
and the wealthy. This will require an antagonistic politics that explains who
really is responsible for ecological crisis that is not inward and
guilt-ridden, and that does not blame working-class consumption.
It will channel
already existing class anger at the rich for causing the ecological crisis.
Contrary to neoliberal orthodoxy, taxing the rich is also very popular among
the working class. Political scientist Spencer Piston’s recent research found
remarkable levels of public support for policies based on what he calls
“resentment of the rich.”95
In response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for higher taxes on the rich to
fund a Green New Deal, a recent poll found that 76 percent of Americans and
even a majority of Republicans are in favor of higher taxes on the rich.96
The second
major source of working-class power is not merely their numbers, but their
strategic location in the workplace as the source of labor underpinning private
profits and public social reproduction. The working class has the capacity to
withdraw their labor and force concessions from capital through strikes and
other forms of disruptive politics. Mass disruptive action can create a larger
sense of crisis, where capital will conclude that “their least painful choice
is to accept the demands of workers for a livable climate and an end to poverty
through a Green New Deal.” 97
Ecological politics has long understood the power of disruption, but usually
deploys this outside the workplace in ways that appear antagonistic to workers.
Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang fictionally depicts activists putting
their bodies in the way of mines and other infrastructure and using tools to
dismantle the machines of ecological destruction.98
In real life, Earth First! developed the tactic of “tree sitting” to block the
logging of old growth forests. Today what Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia”
describes the many activists blocking pipeline expansion and other fossil fuel
infrastructure like coal-fired power plants.99
A modern day “monkey wrench gang” includes the “valve turners” who use bolt
cutters and other tools to access pipeline valves to stop the flow of oil or
gas. These activists rightly recognize the power of mass disruption in winning
political demands.
Yet the current army of eco-direct action activists only
possess limited disruptive capacity. They succeed in blocking a pipeline here,
an oil train there, but fail to put much of a dent in the mass fossil fuel
complex at the center of the reproduction of capitalism. The most inspiring,
and in many ways successful, upsurge was the #nodapl movement at Standing Rock
— yet, in the wake of Trump’s election, the Dakota Access pipeline now carries,
and indeed sometimes spills, fracked crude from the Bakken.
Could ecological
politics appeal to workers with the capacity to shut down capitalism from the
inside? Can we build what Sean Sweeney calls an “ecological unionism” where
workers see their struggle against management as an environmental struggle?100
This could start by simply making the connection between the ways bosses
exploit workers and the environment.
This connection used to be much more
central to the environmental movement in the 1960s. Tony Mazzocchi’s Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers Union helped force the creation of the Occupational
Health and Safety Administration, which was set up with the same purpose in
mind as the Environmental Protection Agency — protecting life from industrial
capitalists. Connor Kilpatrick explains, “As Mazzocchi saw it, those chemicals
that poisoned his union’s rank and file eventually make their way into
communities outside — through the air, soil, and waterways.”101
Although weakened, unions still fight on these terms; in 2015, the United
Steelworkers oil refinery strikes focused in large part on workplace health and
safety.102
Much is made
of the current anti-environmentalism within building-trade unions and those
sectors wrapped up in the fossil fuel industrial complex.103
Several unions supported both the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipeline on the
basis of providing good paying jobs. In environmental struggles, it is often
labor and capital aligned against activists. Yet building-trade workers and
coal miners are a very small proportion of the overall workforce.
It is more plausible
to look outside the dirtiest and most destructive sectors to find a form of
labor militancy that can be conjoined with a larger ecological politics. There
is also reason to not only focus direct action against rural resource
extraction (where the labor movement is very weak). There is a tendency —
reproduced by political ecology scholarship reviewed above — to believe that
the “real” environmental struggle is in the rural sites where we extract the
stuff or where “real” natural landscapes are in peril.
A
working-class ecological politics could also be effectively built within those
industries with very little environmental impact in the first place. Jane
McAlevey has persuasively argued that the health care and education sectors
should be the strategic target of a new working-class union movement.104
These sectors are the very basis of social reproduction in many communities —
and unlike steel plants they cannot be offshored. Alyssa Battistoni also argues
these “social reproduction” or “care” sectors are inherently low-carbon and
low-impact sectors.105
Expanding these sectors should be central to the political ecology focused on
“care” in the larger sense of the term (to include ecosystems and other life
support systems). Many of these struggles are also in the very public sector
that will be crucial to the program of de-commodification reviewed above.
In the last
year, McAlevey’s advice has become reality with the largest wave of strikes
since 1986 — almost all confined to the education sector.106
In line with the program advocated here, these strikes are fundamentally about
fighting austerity and improving the lives of the workers involved. The West
Virginia teachers’ strike, for example, shut down the central institution of
social reproduction (schools) to achieve a set of material demands — including
taxing the fossil fuel industry to provide revenue for better schools.107
But these strikes are also fundamentally about improving life beyond the
workplace.
The teachers’ strikes have been described as “bargaining for the
common good” in which the demands articulate a larger vision of public
betterment through working-class power.108
The recent United Teachers of Los Angeles strike not only demanded better
funded schools, but also increased green spaces on the school grounds.109
This largely anti-austerity politics built around the common good could easily
be folded into a larger green program based on the unionized jobs to create
public green infrastructure, housing, and transit as laid out above. Public
transit unions and workers in the utility sector could also be organized along
these lines.
Building
ecological power through the working class — as the majority of society and
whose labor makes the entire system work — could form a formidable challenge to
the rule of capital over life and planetary survival. Winning this struggle
will begin by emphasizing the need for “less” and “sacrifice” should only be
borne by the rich and corporations; the rest of us have so much to gain.
CONCLUSION
In the crisis
and transformations of the late 1960s and 1970s, two major shifts occurred.
First, using crisis as its pretext, neoliberal forces consolidated to argue
that societal expectations of the postwar “affluent” economy had overshot
reality and austerity was required to check government spending and union
power.
Second, much of the “New Left” was inundated by the newly minted
graduates of the professional classes (themselves a product of the
unprecedented expansion of higher education in the postwar era). This left also
became highly critical of “affluence” and a commodity society based in
consumerism. These two factors converged in an ecology movement almost wholly
populated by this professional class who used scientific models to also argue
that societal “affluence” and consumption required a politics of limits and
austerity.
The quintessential method of this perspective is that of the
ecological footprint tool which ultimately argues it is consumers who drive
economic decision-making and ecological degradation. In this period, it became
taken for granted that an ecological politics meant something different than a
class politics; to put it plainly, ecology demanded a politics of less, class
meant an outdated politics of more. Although some professional-class academics
saw a more radical ecology in material interests, it assumed such a politics
could only be formed on the basis of those marginalized communities with a
direct livelihood relationship with nature or pollution.
During this
same period, capital has only consolidated its power and the ecological crisis
has only worsened. Yet with the Bernie Sanders campaign, other electoral
victories, and an insurgency of strikes and working-class militancy, the Left
is resurgent for the first time in decades. It has finally moved from a
language of “resistance” to a language of how to build power.
Building an
effective environmental politics is not something that needs to be
speculatively designed by non-profits or activist think tanks. We can simply
learn from the existing movement around us. Whether we are organizing around
unions, rent control, health care, or environmental betterment, in every case
capital is fighting to stop it.
As Marx said, “Capital … takes no account of
the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do
so.”110
Capital also takes no account of all life and is taking the planet to the
brink. We just need to develop a social force capable of stopping it.
Matt T. Huber is an associate
professor of geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood:
Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
He is currently working on a book on class and climate politics for Verso
Books.
