London Mayor and Assembly Election – Who to Second Preference for Mayor?

On Thursday 5th of May, millions of London voters will go to the polls to directly elect a Mayor and 25 London Assembly members. The current Mayor is the Tory Boris Johnson who is leaving the post and the 25 seat London Assembly is made up of 12 Labour Members, 9 Tory Members, 2 Lib Dem Members, 2 Green Party Members.

The Assembly is made up of the 14 winning constituency candidates (the ballot paper is coloured yellow), where up to four London boroughs can constitute a constituency. Locally, where I live, the constituency is Enfield and Haringey, won by Labour in 2012, and the Green Party candidate is Ronald Stewart.

The other 11 Assembly members are elected from the London wide Member List (orange coloured ballot paper) on a proportional basis, using what is known as the Modified d’Hondt Formula, similar to that used for European Parliament Elections, and called the ‘additional member’ system. This takes into account the total votes cast in the London-wide ballot together with the number of Constituency London Assembly Member seats that each political party has already won.

A party candidate needs to get 5% of the London wide Member vote to qualify to win one of these seats at least. Parties that win constituency seats (entirely Labour and Tory at the four elections since the first in 2000), have their London Member vote divided by the number of seats already won (plus 1), and each time a party wins a London Member seat, this is added to the number dividing their vote.

To simplify things, for parties who have not won constituency seats, 5% gets you one seat, around 8% gets you two, and around 10% gets you three, but all this depends how the votes actually fall. In 2010 the Green party secured 8.5% of the London Member vote, which yielded two seats.

If you want to see Greens elected to the London Assembly, then make sure you vote Green on the orange coloured ballot paper, as this is where we will win seats, and we can then continue to represent Londoners on green issues.

The Mayoral contest will once again be dominated by the Labour and Tory candidates, Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith. The Green Party candidate is Sian Berry.

The ballot paper for the Mayoral election which is coloured pink, allows for a first and second preference vote. Second preference votes come into play if no single candidate gets more than 50% of the first preference vote. The top two candidates then go forward into a final round, where all the other candidates are eliminated, and their voters’ second preferences are counted. After this exercise the winning candidate is the one with the most first and second preference votes. This type of voting system is known as the ‘supplementary vote’.

At every London Mayor election the Labour and Tory candidates have been in the final run off, (with the exception of Ken Livingstone standing as an independent in 2000, but really he was 'Labour') by some distance, and it is a certainty that this will be case this year. If you vote second preference for any of the other candidates, it will be wasted, as all the other candidates will be eliminated by the final round.

So, who should Green voters second preference for Mayor, Khan or Goldsmith? The London Green Party has yet to decide on a second preference recommendation, but probably will do so in the next couple months.

There was a suggestion by Jenny Jones, one of the outgoing Green Assembly Members, that Greens might vote to second preference Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate, because he has green credentials. Goldsmith is a former editor of The Ecologist magazine and has campaigned on environmental issues, such as against the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

He is also very wealthy with an estimated fortune of over £1 billion and is, well, a very privileged Tory toff. However well-meaning his environmental thinking is, being Green doesn’t stop at giving to good causes like some Victorian philanthropist, it is about challenging the very system that has made Goldsmith so rich. He is one of 1%.

I disagree with Jenny Jones, and there is no way I’ll be voting second preference for Goldsmith, just because he has a bicycle or whatever. I could never vote for a Tory. Somewhat reluctantly, because I’m no big fan of Sadiq Khan either, I will second preference the Labour candidate for London Mayor.    

Greens are the most Left Wing Major Political Party in the UK

A survey was conducted by academics at Queen Mary University London and Sussex University (in association with YouGov) just after the General Election last year, seems to show that the voters in Britain think the Green Party is most left wing major party in the UK. The voters who identified themselves as strong supporters of Conservative, Labour, Lid Dem, SNP, UKIP and the Greens were surveyed and their findings are published at the LSE website.

The people surveyed were asked to rate the party they supported and the other party as Left or Right wing, on a scale where 0 is very left wing and 10 is very right wing. The results are illustrated above. If you look along the line horizontally, say of Green supporters, you can see that they rate the Greens as quite left wing (2.30), a full point ahead of Labour and more than two points more than the Lib Dems.

There is a rider here, this poll was conducted before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party, so I would think that Labour would score more left wing now, although that is not apparent from the behaviour of Labour MPs so far. Interestingly, supporters Labour rated themselves as more left wing than the party, which does indicate that Corbyn was pushing at an open door in trying to move Labour left. Green supporters rated themselves slightly to the right of the Greens.

They surveyors rated the parties as well, and I don't know what criteria they used but it does seem to be fairly accurate (the last row of scores), although I'm unsure how they came to rate Labour as slightly to the left of the Greens?

The second table shows how supporters of these parties rated the other parties on the left/right scale. You can see that Labour supporters rated the Greens as more left wing than Labour (slightly), as did most supporters of the other parties, with the odd exception like the Tory and UKIP supporters rating Labour as more left than the Greens (and the SNP even more so), but this may be out of habit with Labour. The SNP were put about about in the Tory press dangerous left wingers which may have influenced their rating by Tories). In general though, from left to right, it runs Greens, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, UKIP, and Conservative, on the left/right scale.

It does look from these results, and remember these are strong supporters of the parties and so no doubt quite politically engaged, more so than floating voters say, that voters in the UK are more left wing than has been suggested, certainly the mainstream media.

It we take the Tory rating, by its supporters, of 7.8 as the far right wing end of the scale, then the famous 'middle ground' would be a rating of 3.9, which the SNP (3.55) comes closest to. The Lib Dems are regarded, by their own supporters, as more to the right.

It could be that the public is more left wing than thought, and it may just come down to having an effective leader, like Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP to put across left policies, rather than any great reluctance on UK to support left policies and parties.

2015 was a Record Year for Protests

An interesting piece written by David J Bailey over at The Conversation informs us that last year was a record year for protesting. His data shows that in 2011 protests peaked, the year of the Arab Spring, Occupy, UK Uncut, urban riots and anti-austerity and tuition fee protests, but 2015 did surpass 2011. After a fall in protests over the next two years, they then rose sharply from 2013 to a new peak in 2015.

Bailey has calculated the number of protests in the UK from 1980. The graph below shows the trends up until 2015. Protests fell back in the 1980s and 1990s, before steadying in the naughties with a rise in 2003 due, I will assume, to the Iraq war and the huge demonstrations that were provoked by the Labour government’s ill-judged military adventure in that unfortunate country. Protests then fell back again, until the financial crisis in 2008, from where they have sharply risen, after a fall back in 2010.

The participants of protests has changed over this period, and it is like a visual history of the country and how content we, the political activists, have been with our lot over the last thirty five years. The chart below details this changing of the groups of people involved in protests over the period.    

It is noticeable, and comes as no great surprise really, that in 1980, workers (union members) were by far the biggest protest group. Margaret Thatcher's neo-liberal Tory party was in power, and workers were under constant attack from the government. At this time over 13 million people were members of trade unions, which has fallen dramatically to about 6 million members today, mainly confined to the public sector, or former public sector.

Workers accounted for 70% of protests in 1980 but only 20% in 2015. In 2015 environmentalists, housing activists, students, pro-minority groups (including those supporting refugees and asylum seekers) and anti-cuts activists groups, contributed 40% of protests (up from less than 10% in 1980).

Not only does this reflect the decline in union membership and tough anti-strike laws introduced over the last thirty five years, but also the nature of protests and protesters. Climate change chief amongst them, environmental concerns are growing, where they were a minority cause in 1980, but there does seem to be more inclination for other groups to demonstrate, such as housing activists, and for them to organise and campaign, on a wide range of issues.

2015 saw environmentalists, housing activists and ant-austerity groups drawing together, in the joint climate, housing and anti-austerity demonstration organised with the People’s Assembly over the summer. There appears to be a realisation that together we are stronger, rather than just pursuing separate, single issue campaigns and that these issues are profoundly linked to our political and economic system. Their struggle is our struggle, kind of solidarity, across class lines in many cases.

It is also illuminating to look at what people were actually protesting about. The graphic below gives an illustration of these issues.

We can see that strikes account for far less protests in 2015 as compared with 1980. Demonstrations have increased, although it is interesting to note that they fell a little after 2011, but the biggest increase between 1980 and 2015 is in 'disruption' and 'other'. 

These actions were in the form of direct action, occupations or stunts performed by protesters, like Vivienne Westwood driving a tank to the Prime Minister’s home.

Some of the biggest demonstrations of 2015 continued to focus on the government’s austerity measures, including the 100,000 attendees at the People’s Assembly Against Austerity in June and 50,000 people protesting outside the Conservative Party Conference in October. September also saw 30,000 demonstrators calling for the government to do more to help refugees, and in November 50,000 environmentalists demonstrated in support of stronger government action to be agreed at the Paris summit.

It looks likely that these trends will continue, as there is plenty to protest about with our nasty Tory government set on destroying what is left of our welfare state. Will there come a point when a critical mass is reached, and these protests explode into a potentially revolutionary force? The future is hard to read, but when we look back at things like the May 1968 French protests, nobody really saw that coming at the time, but it became a very powerful social movement.

Who knows, it might only take one spark, to ignite the whole situation. History also teaches us, that things never stay the same forever.  

Murray Bookchin and Ecosocialism

Murray Bookchin has become rather fashionable again recently in radical political circles, mainly due to his ideas being adopted by the Kurdish PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, who read Bookchin’s work whilst in a Turkish prison in the late 1990s. Can we count Bookchin as an Ecosocialist though?

Öcalan attempted in early 2004 to arrange a meeting with Bookchin through his lawyers, describing himself as Bookchin's "student" eager to adapt his thought to Middle Eastern society. Though Bookchin was too ill to accept the request, he sent back a message of support. When Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as "one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century", and vowed to put his theory into practice.

Which they did, in the area of northern Syria which they call Rojava in 2012, and they are still fighting to fully establish themselves there, in that war torn area. Traditionally, the PKK, were a Marxist/Leninist organisation, but reinvented themselves as anarcho-communists, following Bookchin’s ideas on the forms of real local democracy.

Bookchin himself was a former Marxist socialist, but became disillusioned mainly with the thinking of contemporary Marxists’ in the 1960s, especially in American academia. He set out much of his new thinking in pamphlets and essays, the best of which are brought together in his book, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, published in 1970. In the introduction to the second edition of the book he wrote ‘Socialism has become an industry and its literary works are commodities.’

Although Bookchin acknowledged Marx’s ‘rich’ contribution to the understanding of and the potential overthrow of the capitalist system, he thought it outdated. He set Marx in the context of his time, where material scarcity was the norm, but viewed from 1960s America (quite rightly) which had no scarcity, that this changed the environment in which revolutionary conditions might occur.

In Listen Marxist! a chapter in Post-Scarcity Anarchism he really lays into Marxist thinking, and accuses Marx directly of being an undemocratic centraliser with all that goes with it, notably a lack of liberty, no better and even sometimes worse than the bourgeois system socialists wanted to replace. He also is very critical of the Bolsheviks and their role in emascalating the soviets and factory committees, after the Russian revolution.

Ecosocialists are to some extent divided on whether Marx was an Ecosocialist or not, some seeing him as mainly a ‘productivist’. Indeed, Ecosocialism is probably closer to Anarchism than mainsteam twentieth century socialisms. Certainly Marx has a big influence on Ecosocialism, but that was true of Bookchin as well. Personally, I tend to agree with Bookchin, but I am agnostic on the matter anyway, I don’t think it matters much whether Marx was Green, for example. We take from him his thoughts on capitalism and socialism and use them for our age.

Bookchin called his ideas anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist but he also coined a term which alluded to ecological matters, and so was the theory of Social Ecology formed. I think he still had an affection for socialism though, as he did state that the ‘social’ stood for socialist, but he didn’t want to confuse this with the contemporary Marxist socialism of the time. From this perspective, Socialist Ecology is in many ways the same thing as Ecosocialism, a term that had not been used by the time Bookchin was formulating his thoughts.

Like Marx, Bookchin’s work now looks dated. I think scarcity will be back quite soon, as natural resources deplete and climate change makes land scarce and drinking water in all probability too. I don't share his faith in technology to save us, either. But I do take his point, the world has moved on from the nineteenth century when Marx was developing his ideas for a post capitalist socialist world.

Joel Kovel, a very important figure in the emergence of Ecosocialism, studied Bookchin’s work and concluded that Social Ecology is much the same thing as Ecosocialism. Particularly around the idea of not having nation states, with all the evidence we have had of socialist states in practice, which generally seem to stifle true freedom and democracy. Ecosocialist’s want democracy from the bottom up, not the top down, and horizontal power structures, just like Bookchin advocated.

So, I think we can say that Murray Bookchin was an important figure in the tradition of Ecosocialism, and in the end it is only a matter of terminology. Whether he counts as an Ecosocialist, I don't know, but I certainly like to think that he does.

A Historic Event or a Fraud? -- Critical Thoughts on the Paris Climate Accord

By Saral Sarkar

Considering that so much depends on whether global warming can be arrested soon, it was no wonder that all thinking people had turned their attention to Paris, where on 13^th December the COP21 "successfully" ended, with great jubilation. I too followed the process through the media.

Positive and Negative Reactions

A day after, I read the following comments: (1) "Today is a historic day: as tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Paris, politicians finalized a major new global climate agreement". And (2) "It’s a fraud really, a fake,”… “It’s just bullshit…"¹ The first was made by May Boeve, the US national organizer of 350.org, a big NGO, that is playing a leading role in the climate justice movement, the second by James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, considered the father of climate change awareness. Which one can we regard as the correct assessment?

Given that nobody in my position has the time and energy to read all the reports and comments on the COP21, I hope that my readers would forgive me if I have overlooked some important point in the agreement or an important comment on it. But fairness demands that I also mention a middle position, for example that of Thomas Friedman, a liberal columnist of the New York Times. He wrote:"I had low expectations for the U.N. climate meeting, and it met all of them – beautifully. I say that without cynicism. Any global conference that includes so many countries can’t be expected to agree on much more than the lowest common denominator."²

That is understandable. As far as I could follow, nobody had big expectations. But then I do not understand how May and other prominent people of big NGOs can be so enthusiastic about it. Bill McKibben wrote: "With the climate talks in Paris now over, the world has set itself a serious goal." ³ 

I have doubts. Was the goal really set seriously? Friedman wrote: "But the fact that the lowest common denominator is now so high [he means the target 1.5⁰ Celcius] – a willingness by 188 countries to offer plans to steadily and verifiably reduce their carbon emissions – means we still have a chance." ² Again I have doubts. I would very much like to agree with Boeve, McKibben, and Friedman. But at present at least, I cannot, for reasons I shall present below.

Why Call it a Fraud?

I too think, like Hansen, the accord was a fraud, but for reasons very different from those of his. I think it was only because they were afraid of being branded as the guilty in case the COP21 failed to reach an agreement that the major CO₂ emitter countries reluctantly decided to sign this very weak paper. But paper, as the Germans say, is patient. If you want evidence, then look at the position with which the government of India went to Paris. Only a few months before the COP21 began, the government of India had announced the policy decision to double India's coal production in the next 5 years. Just a few days before he left for Paris, Mr. Javadekar, India's environment minister, had said in an interview: "I'm asking the developed world to vacate the carbon space so that we can park our development."⁴

Retorting to US Secretary of State John Kerry's criticism of India's decision to double its coal production, Javadekar had remarked it was "absolutely unfair and unacceptable," especially since the CO₂ reduction targets announced by the developed countries would fail to arrest the climate change crisis, which they had a historical responsibility of fixing after a century of pumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. He also warned the Americans against "bullying" India.⁴

Or take the case of Norway, very rich in oil and gas. Just twelve days after they signed the Paris accord, the prime minister of the country said:"We believe that in a situation in which we shall have attained the goal of Paris, there will be demand for Norwegian oil and gas."⁵ So they are continuing with all the plans and projects for extracting oil and gas from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. While claiming that they want to protect the Arctic from the effects of global warming, they are speculating on the melting of the arctic ice that will make more access to oil and gas possible. It seems they are saying (in German): Wasch mir den Pelz aber mach mich nicht nass, or (in English): We want to eat the cake and have it too.

These are actually irreconcilable positions. We can formulate them as two most fundamental controversial questions: (1) Should the underdeveloped countries be allowed to develop their economies to the level reached by the USA or Germany? (2) And must the economies of the developed countries be scaled down, in order to vacate the carbon space in favor of the former? In Paris, these questions were probably not put on the table in these stark terms. In the interview referred to above, Mr. Javedkar, while asserting India's right – implicitly the right of all underdeveloped countries – to development, did not raise the second question. The Paris accord too recognizes all underdeveloped countries' "right to development". It "… aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, … " (Article 2). But it does not mention the second question.

It appears that all participants in COP21, the big and small environment NGOs, publicists, and activists take it as a matter of course that the answer to the first question is Yes, and that to the second is No. The controversy was just papered over. It is simply taken for granted that a deus ex machina, namely technological development, would enable humankind to solve the problem of global warming without causing any pain to anybody, and that it only needs some more time and large investments in renewable energies and efficiency-raising technologies. In the rich, developed countries, a large part of the hope of technology optimists is placed on the carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, although not even its feasibility has yet been established. Bill Mckibben, founder and leader of 350.org, charts the strategy for the coming years.⁶ The state(s) must do the following:

"You’ve got to stop fracking right away … . You have to start installing solar panels and windmills at a breakneck pace – and all over the world. The huge subsidies doled out to fossil fuel have to end yesterday, and the huge subsidies to renewable energy had better begin tomorrow. You have to raise the price of carbon steeply and quickly, so everyone gets a clear signal to get off of it."

And he lays down the task of the movement as follows:

"There can be no complacency after the Paris talks. Hitting even the 1.5C target will need drastic, rapid action. Think of the climate movement as personal trainers – for the next few years our job is to yell and scream at governments everywhere to get up off the couch."

The most popular article of faith of environmental NGOs and activists (not of governments) is that – given the right policy decisions such as those laid down by McKibben in the above quote, and correspondingly large amounts of state subsidies – it would be possible in two to three decades to meet 100 percent of humanity's energy needs by means of renewable energy technologies, so that burning fossil fuels would not be necessary at all; there would also be no need for the CCS technology.

Hansen calls the accord a fraud, mainly because he sees no concrete action plan in it, only promises that, moreover, the signatory states are required to implement gradually, beginning only in 2020. His idea was a tax or price or fee of $15 a tonne of CO₂ to be paid by major emitters. He argued that only this measure could force down CO₂ emissions quickly enough. But he found no support, not even among big environment groups, because, as he said, nobody wants to scare people off by talking of new taxes.¹

I could have supported the tax proposal of Hansen if he had stopped there. But, like the others mentioned above, he too believes that ultimately it is only by replacing fossil fuel energies with clean energies that we can avert climate catastrophes. For he says in the same interview: "We need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy."¹

Unlike Hansen, I see the fraud taking place since long, and it is contained in the very conceptions of the proposed solutions – in all parts thereof and both in their short as well as long-term versions. Firstly, the whole COP process from the very beginning, i.e. since 1992 onwards, is swearing to promote sustainable development and eradicate poverty while at the same time protecting the environment and averting global warming. The COP21 did the same. Otherwise the developing countries would not have taken part in the process. But how do you, in the short term, eradicate poverty in developing countries, e.g. in India, South Africa or Colombia, if you make power much dearer by (a) imposing a tax of $15 a tonne of CO₂ payable by major emitters (that includes India), (b) by ending all subsidies to fossil fuels, and (c) paying huge subsidies to renewable energies (where will the huge sums come from)?

Most persons, groups, parties etc. mentioned above simply assume that economic growth i.e. growth in prosperity can and will continue without any problem when the fossil fuel energies have been replaced with "clean" energies. As against that, I (and my political friends, e.g. Ted Trainer) believe since long that it is absolutely necessary that the major industrial countries, including China, India, Brazil etc. purposely bring about a contraction of their economies – in order not only to stop burning more and more fossil fuels but also to reduce the general level of environmental pollution. We do not think that economic growth would be possible if we really want to save the biosphere. 

I can also cite evidence supporting this belief: In recent history, the only time CO₂ emission and general environmental pollution went down in a large region were the 1990s, i.e. after the Eastern European economies, especially the then second biggest economy of the world, that of the Soviet Union, collapsed. But in the Paris accord there is no mention of this necessity. The whole de-growth movement has been totally ignored, also by the big environmental NGOs. They simply believe in miracles.

One may ask why I doubt that it would be possible, if not soon, then at least in the near future or in the long term to fully or at least largely replace fossil fuel energies (and other nonrenewable resources) with renewable ones. After all, technological progress is taking place all the time! Basing myself on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's differentiation between feasible and viable,⁷ I have been expressing this doubt for the last 25 years. It is not possible to repeat all my arguments here; interested people may read some of my writings recommended below.⁸ Here I only want to refer to two sets of facts that serve as indications that my doubt may be justified.

(1) Already in 1994, Eurosolar and its friends and associate organizations claimed in a full-page advertisement in the German print media that solar energy based on the technology developed till then could compete with fossil fuel energies. But today, after twenty more years of research and development, we see that solar energy is still neither competitive nor viable without large subsidies. That is why even today new coal-fired power plants are being built? 

(2) India is very rich in sunshine and wind. Still its government wants to double coal production in order to supply energy to the masses. Why? And why do its politicians say, it is only coal that India has for energy? Are the Indian engineers stupid or ignorant? Or have they all sold away their conscience to the coal lobby?

Protagonists of green growth, i.e. growth based on 100% transition to renewables are all very intelligent people. Yet they are ignoring these facts and questions. If they are not intentionally bluffing, then they are, I believe, suffering from an illusion. There are some more reasons why I criticize the big environmental NGOs. (1) They – unlike Hansen, who has called the whole agreement a fraud – have exonerated the political class (the authors of the Paris Deal) from all guilt, as if they are not always ready to fulfill the wishes of big corporations, as if they are actually good people who, like the NGOs, care for the interests of the masses, the only "villains" being the fossil fuel industries. Opposing these villains are, in their view, the good "ordinary people", the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, as if they do not want to consume more and more energy and other products of fossil fuels. This is too naïve, if it is not a fraud too. (2) 

They have isolated the climate crisis from all other crises involved in mankind's present predicament, as if they are not interconnected. They simply ignore the totality of the crisis. (3) They do not seem to know that the $100 billion that the politicians of the rich countries have promised to pay to the victims of global warming will first have to be generated by producing more green house gases. (4) It appears, moreover, that they have not noticed that these are all only promises. Don't they know that governments, especially in times of economic crisis, never deliver what they promise? The UNHCR, for example, recently reduced the food ration to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan etc. because they haven't received all the money that was promised to them.

But the more basic problem I have with those who are euphoric about the Paris accord is that the signatory governments as well as the NGOs, green and left parties etc. do not even mention the real and deeper causes of the ecological, economic, political and social miseries of humankind, of which climate change and large-scale migration are just currently the most glaring manifestations. These real and deeper causes are the continuously growing demands, aspirations and ambitions of a continuously growing world population, while our resource base is continuously dwindling and the ability of nature to absorb man-made pollution is continuously diminishing – in short, the lunatic idea that in a finite world infinite growth is possible.

Is the System Question Irrelevant?

What I, moreover, found very strange is that, all along, all people involved in the COP process assumed that the envisioned drastic changes in such a vital factor as the energy supply base of the modern industrial economies could be undertaken without requiring any changes in the current political-economic system.

Of course, one could not expect from the politicians who signed the deal that they would include in it a clause stating that the system they have built up and which has made them rich and powerful also needs to be changed. But how come also the rest of the involved people did not have the slightest doubt that the huge problem can be solved within the framework of capitalism and free market economy? Outside this circle, however, in the context of the problems at hand, the system question had already been posed several hundred times, in speeches and writings, before the COP21 began. In TV news broadcasts, I have even a few times seen pictures of radical leftist protesters carrying banners and placards with the slogan "System change, not climate change".

Can't one expect of honest and thinking NGO and media people that they also at least consider the possibility that the technological breakthroughs – 100% renewable energy, CCS etc., on which they are placing all their hopes – do not occur or do not occur in time? If they do not occur, shouldn't one have a plan B for averting the catastrophes? In plain English, if humanity can no longer indulge in the growth compulsions inherent in capitalism with its principle of competition in a free market economy, shouldn't the state(s) step in and order a stop in further economic growth? Shouldn't the state(s) then tell the people that they have to accept a contracting economy and all the consequences thereof? Shouldn't the state(s), from then on, plan an orderly withdrawal from the present mad economic system?⁹

Unfortunately, many people who do raise the system question – there are even some prominent people among them – often do that half-heartedly. They often question "capitalism as we know it or as it is today" or "globalized neo-liberal capitalism", as if a better form of capitalism is conceivable, as if it could be made ecological, social or humane, and compatible with economic contraction. I do not think such half-hearted critiques are of any use. Such people do not realize that as long as the motive of profit maximization and the principles of private ownership of means of production, selfishness, and competition remain – and these are the most essential elements of capitalism –, there would always be a compulsion to grow, whatever that may cost human society and nature. That will bring to nought all efforts to overcome the climate crisis and many other crises.

Conclusion. Can Anything be Done Before an Eco-Socialist Revolution?

A friend said to me: look, Saral, I am convinced what you are saying is correct. But your eco-socialist revolution may never happen or it may come too late. Can't the powers that be do something short of your revolution, and soon? And can't ordinary people, who are afraid of too radical a change, urge them to do something in this emergency situation.

I think that is possible. But a fraud on the people is not what I can advocate. A fraud cannot help even if we, as Mckibben urges us to do, "yell and scream at governments everywhere to get up off the couch."

I can today imagine that an honest, well-meaning (think of PODEMOS and SYRIZA), and eco-sensitive social democratic party in near future comes to power through an election and gives itself, against the background of humanity's serious multifaceted crisis, an immediate program that could be implemented within the framework of current kinds of democracy and capitalism.

The top priority of such a program should be to tell the voters the truth about limits to growth (and prosperity) and the necessity of respecting them, and then to take all feasible measures to gradually curtail economic growth, if not immediately and totally stop it. That should not be impossible. In fact, in Japan and the EU (with the exception of Germany), the economies are already stagnating – in Japan for the last 15 or 25 years and in the EU since 2008. Already now, people in the rich countries are getting used to stagnating economies or (as in China) falling growth rates. In Greece, Portugal and Spain people have experienced falling wages and cuts in salaries, pensions, and social benefits. 

We only have to make a virtue of this unwelcome development by openly and courageously saying that a recession is good for the environment including the climate. The government must only equitably distribute the burdens of protecting the environment in this way, and the burdens of the resulting unemployment by reducing by law the average weekly working hours.

In the broad environmental movements in the Western capitalist countries, we can find many concrete proposals and concrete examples for this policy: Governments can promote public transportation and discourage private motorization. Activists can start a system of borrowable cars and two-wheelers owned by groups. Governments can pass orders to the effect that individual private cars can be used only on alternate days etc. etc. Above all, governments must stop all previous policies of promoting growth. All such things work against the capitalist ideal of growth and lead us toward collectivism. In the past, capitalists have had to swallow them.

As far as I can observe, in the developed countries, among the masses, understanding for such policies is growing, although it is still far from becoming the majority view. Particularly political parties that want to get elected to parliaments are still not ready to adopt such a program. The Green Party of Germany has of course, long ago, betrayed its original program. But the latter was really an ecological social-democratic one.¹⁰ Here lies the great task of extra-parliamentary environmentalists and eco-socialist groups and individuals: to mobilize mass support for such a program. Today, the chances that they would succeed are much greater than in the early 1980s.

In the underdeveloped countries, the two most important parts of such an immediate program should be to stop population growth and build up a modest social security and job guarantee system.¹¹ Fortunately, both ideas are well accepted among the elites of many of such countries, although implementation is weak. To drive the illusions of catching-up economic development and growing prosperity out of their heads would become much easier once the elites of the developed countries have done their part of the work.

Saral Sarkar is an ecosocialist writer who blogs here

References

1. The first was communicated to me by my friend Kamran Nayeri. For the second seeHansen, James (2015): http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud

2. Friedman, Thomas L. (2015): http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/opinion/paris-climate-accord-is-a-big-big-deal.html?_r=02

3. McKibben, Bill (2015) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-talks-15c-marathon-negotiating-physics

4. Javadekar http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/11/21/prakash-javadekar-intervi_n_8617864.html

5. Bigalke, Silke (2015) "An der Eiskante" . In Süddeutache Zeitung, 28.12. 2015

6. Mckibben, Bill (2015) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-talks-15c-marathon-negotiating-physics

7. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1978) "Technology Assessment: The Case of the Direct Use of Solar Energy", in Atlantic Economic Journal, December.

8. My detailed arguments on this issue are contained in
chapter 4 of my book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? (see 9),
in http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/2014/04/krugmans-illusion-we-becoming-richer.html
and in http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/2015/09/root-causes-of-cleavages-in-ecological.html

9. I have thoroughly discussed these questions in my book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of Humanity's fundamental Choices. (1999. Zed Books, London).
In German translation: Die Nachhaltige Gesellschaft – Eine kritische Analyse der Systemalternativen. (2001. Rotpunkt Verlag, Zürich)

10. See: Saral Sarkar (1994) Green-Alternative Politics in West Germany – Vol.II: The Greens. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

11. For details of my argumentation see http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/2012/08/polemics-is-useless-proposal-for-eco.html

Should Corbyn have sacked Hiliary Benn? Probably...

After the protracted, what was in the end only a mini reshuffle of Labour’s front bench team, the dust finally seems to have settled. I think it is fair to say that the reshuffle was an object example of how not to do one, and what I can only imagine was a deliberately neglectful media strategy, was becoming embarrassing. But more of this later.

Certainly in the media, and I dare say in Corbyn’s inner circle, Hiliary Benn was the main focus of attention. The media, with the backing of the Tories have built Benn up after his pro-bombing Syria speech in Parliament, as an alternative leader of the Labour Party. The media loves to make these things into a clash of ‘personalities’, and it had been trailed since before Christmas as a ‘revenge reshuffle’ and so on.

Benn was eventually confirmed as carrying on in his post of shadow Foreign Secretary, after what appears to be some kind of gentleman’s agreement between Corbyn and Benn, but the details have not been made public. Corbyn’s team quickly spun the decision as Benn being made to follow Corbyn’s lead on foreign affairs, but Benn stated that he would not be ‘muzzled’ and would carry on as normal.

I watched Diane Abbott on BBC TV Newsnight refusing to answer directly the question of what Benn had agreed to do, or not do. All she kept repeating was that Labour members expect to see their spokespeople speaking for the policies they had voted for in electing Corbyn as leader, or words to that effect.

Only time will tell, if whatever agreement was reached between Corbyn and Benn, will satisfy both parties in practice, particularly as the bombing of Islamic State in Libya is the next likely clashing point, and I suspect it will not survive such an issue as that.

If we are to believe what we have seen in the media, maybe as many as a ten shadow Cabinet members were prepared to resign if Benn was sacked, which would have caused a big problem for Corbyn, and this is maybe why he decided to fudge the issue. Maybe better to just sack one largely unheard of member of the team, and a couple lower down the shadow ministerial chain, move Maria Eagle from Defence, only minor resignations, buy some more time?

The other factor of course, is Corbyn himself. He is a genuine guy, and he really does want to practice a new politics, as observed with the complete disregard of managing the media operation surrounding the reshuffle. Unfortunately, the media do matter in politics, and whilst not pandering to them, they need to be manipulated a bit back, not ignored. It all looked a bit shambolic.

Politics though is a dirty game, particularly at the level Corbyn is at now, there are no Marquis of Queensberry rules in politics, and if he doesn’t toughen up, he is probably finished.

I think he may have been better to have got over the resignations and fired Benn if he was unprepared to tow the leadership line in matters of Britain’s foreign military interventions. Corbyn was right to think that we can’t have another occasion like the bombing of Syria debate, where the leader and foreign policy spokesperson are arguing against each other.

It was reported at that time that Benn threatened to make his speech from the back benches if he was sacked and again Corbyn drew back. If he had sacked Benn this week, he would be a thorn in the side on the back benches, but surely this would be better than contradicting Labour from the top table?

It was a risk to keep Benn and also to sack him, but on the balance of probabilities, I think, Corbyn has probably stored up more trouble for the future, rather than less, by keeping him in the leadership team.   

Review of Capitalism & Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming

By David Klein, illustrated and edited by Stephanie McMillan

This review is by Michael Gasser, who I and a few other London Green Left people met in London last August. It was first published at Solidarity US.

An ebook available for download at Gumroad, a site where people can sell their work directly to their audience: https://gumroad.com/l/climatechange#. You choose your own price.

MOST BOOKS ON ecosocialism, while they may be of interest to those who already know something about socialism, especially those who already are socialists, are not particularly useful for those who want to be aware of both what climate change is and what capitalism is.

Naomi Klein’s best-selling book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate, filled part of this gap, but as several reviewers have noted (1), by “capitalism” Naomi Klein seems to mean the variant of it that is usually called “neoliberalism,” the austerity and privatization enforced around the world by international financial institutions since the 1980s. As valuable as her book is, it is not, and does not pretend to be, a Marxist take on the crisis.

With Capitalism & Climate Change ecosocialist David Klein, with considerable help from revolutionary cartoonist Stephanie McMillan, gives us the best available primer, from a radical perspective, on what the ecological crisis is about and what is causing it. Far from challenging Naomi Klein’s similarly titled book, however, David Klein frequently relies on Naomi Klein, and in some ways, the two books complement each other.

Because they appeared within months of one another and because of their similar titles, it is natural to want to compare them. (For simplification, in what follows when I write simply “Klein,” I’ll mean David Klein).

Capitalism & Climate Change is divided into two sections, the first covering the nature of the climate crisis itself, the second capitalism’s role in creating the crisis, its inability to get us out of it, and what we can do about it.

What Science Tells Us

Klein starts Part 1,“What does climate science tell us?” with a look at the climate change denial movement, how it is funded, and how it challenges mainstream climate science. While some of this section will be familiar from Naomi Klein — who also begins with this topic — what will be new is the discussion of the lengths the deniers and their financial backers have gone to to intimidate mainstream climate scientists, up to and including anonymous threats against individual scientists.

In more ways than one, the climate change deniers, or more significantly their financial backers, mean business!

The remainder of the first section is an overview of the science behind the climate crisis. As a mathematical physicist who is director of the Climate Sciences Program at California State University at Northridge, Klein not only has a deep understanding of the science, he knows how to explain the science to a layperson.

If you want really clear explanations of how greenhouse gases cause global warming, of the carbon cycle and how it’s being disrupted, of ocean acidification, you’ll find them here. If you don’t know what chemical weathering and methane hydrates are (I didn’t), you’ll learn about them here too.

If you want to know how dire things will get under different possible global temperature rises, Klein has all the bad news for you. He ends this section on a hopeful note, however, looking at what the technical options are for a world relatively free of greenhouse gas emissions.

Again there is some overlap with Naomi Klein, for example, in the discussion of the research of Jacobson and Delucchi on the possibilities for complete conversion to renewable energy.(2)

Jacobson and Delucchi’s much-cited work examines in great detail how all the world’s energy needs could technically be met by a combination of wind, water, and solar power. Although their research has been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the variability problem for sunlight and wind and the consequent need for extensive backup systems,(3) it does make a strong case that renewables could cover a significant proportion of the electric power, transportation, heating, and cooling required for the world’s population.

But Klein goes further than Naomi Klein here, examining agriculture, air travel, buildings, and pollution associated with renewables. He concludes that “humanity has within its grasp all of the technical means to create a thriving and sustainable future in harmony with nature.”

As others have concluded, not only Naomi Klein but also Jacobson and Delucchi, what is holding us back is not the science or engineering required. The problem is political/social/economic.

Capitalism Can’t Solve It

A starting point for any examination of the role of capitalism in the climate crisis (or any of the other ecological and social crises it is implicated in) must be a basic agreement on what we mean by capitalism. Sadly but not surprisingly, there is so little discussion of capitalism within mainstream North American discourse that most people are left with only a vague understanding of what we’re talking about.

For many people, “capitalism” may be something more or less eternal, associated in some fundamental way with human nature, with greed, with freedom, with achievement. Of course we’re not supposed to question capitalism, and this is why it’s off the table.

In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, Klein defines capitalism, discusses its direct effects on the environment, and explains its inevitable drive towards growth. It’s only 38 pages, but we are again rewarded by Klein’s ability to make abstract concepts understandable to those with little or no background.

In this part of the book, McMillan clearly plays a bigger role; she has plenty of experience explaining, as well as fighting, capitalism. In fact some of the cartoons in this section come from her excellent introduction to capitalism, Capitalism Must Die!(4)

Klein and McMillan define capitalism as follows:

“Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately owned.

The owners, or capitalists, appropriate the surplus product created by the workers. This appropriation leads to the accumulation of more capital, the amassing of wealth, further investment, and thus the expansion of capitalism. Commodities are produced for the purpose of generating profit and promoting accumulation. Within the capitalist system, individuals pursue their self interests against competition and impersonal forces of the market.”

Some of the more useful sections of this part of the book look at consequences of capitalism that are conspicuously missing from Naomi Klein’s book, in particular the military industrial complex and population growth. Klein explains how imperialist wars are an inevitable consequence of capitalism and a major source of massive greenhouse gas emissions in addition to their more obvious destructive consequences for the countries that are invaded.

He also shows how population growth is not just a result of the improvements in medical care that came with the industrial revolution but also a veritable requirement of capitalism, given the need for reserves of consumers and cheap labor.

We’re also introduced here to Jevons’ paradox. In the mid-19th century, British economist William Stanley Jevons discovered that increases in the efficiency of coal-powered steam engines led to an increase rather than a decrease in consumption of coal, as had been expected. As efficiency increased, use of the engines expanded (and capitalism itself expanded as a consequence), requiring even more coal.

Jevons’ paradox applies equally well to a range of modern resources. For example, improvements in the efficiency of passenger aircraft, requiring less fuel per passenger mile, have made air travel less expensive, resulting in an increase in air travel and the consumption of jet fuel. Jevons’ paradox gives the lie to arguments that the technological advances that come with capitalism are part of the ecological solution; in fact they are part of the problem.

In Chapter 11, Klein takes on green capitalism. Some of this, especially the critique of some of the mainstream environmental NGOs and of carbon trading, will be familiar from Naomi Klein’s book and from the work of ecosocialist economist Richard Smith, whose work is cited.(5)

Klein rejects both carbon trading schemes, such as cap-and-trade and carbon offsets, and flat carbon taxes, arguing that debates within the capitalist class over which is more effective may boil down to tensions between finance capital (favoring carbon trading) and industrial capital (favoring carbon taxes).

In either case, “corporations will not allow governments to curtail profits,” and when profits are threatened by a particular policy, as happened with Australia’s carbon tax, that policy is repealed.

Less familiar are the arguments against “green consumerism” and the “solutions” offered by the European social democracies of Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Green consumerism, sometimes known elsewhere as “lifestyle activism,” is based on the flawed notion that consumers are actually in charge of the market, that an enlightened public can simply choose to “buy green” or buy less.

This view fails to recognize the role of marketing and its power to affect consumers’ behavior: it’s the corporations that are in charge, not the consumers. Furthermore, increasing privatization of basic social services means that people often have no choice concerning how or whether to spend their money.

Green consumerism ends up being at best, little more than a feel-good strategy for the privileged, at worst, a misguided response to greenwashing; McMillan’s wonderful cartoons make this point very well.

Considerable attention has been focused on European countries as examples of how sustainability is compatible with capitalism. Although the trends towards locally-controlled renewable electric power in Germany and Denmark are positive, both are major consumers of biofuels, which may have devastating ecological effects in the countries where they are produced.

Capital’s Addiction and the Cure

In Chapter 12, Klein shows how the capitalist system is so addicted to fossil fuels that nothing short of a revolution can wean it away from their use.

The last two chapters offer a brief discussion of how we should go about ending capitalism and what should replace it. Again this section covers material in an accessible way for the uninitiated.

Klein admits that we are not in a period characterized by organized working class resistance to capitalism, but offers a three-step prescription for what to do under the circumstances, borrowed from Capitalism Must Die!: affirm (raise consciousness), consolidate (organize forces), struggle.

The contrast with Naomi Klein’s version of what has to happen is striking: while Blockadia-type campaigns would certainly play a part in the revolutionary strategy supported by Klein and McMillan, here we are urged to “build strategic alliances,” to be “prepared ideologically and organizationally,” to avoid the “trap of reformism,” and to eventually “halt the production of capital.”

In the final chapter, Klein is rightly cautious about laying out the details of the society we are striving for, first, because it must be up to those struggling to create this society to determine how it will work, and second, because too much is unpredictable — future revolutionaries will need to take into account the material conditions in which the new world is constructed.

However, he does leave us with a few guidelines. While many industries will have to be drastically curtailed or shut down, others, including those that are essential for the health and well-being of society, will actually need to be expanded, and a process of sustainable industrialization will need to be undertaken in the regions of the world that have borne the brunt of colonialism.

Within the climate justice movement, there is clearly the increasing recognition that the system is the problem. Ecosocialism offers a framework for understanding why this is so and (to a lesser extent) what we can do about it.

When activists I know want to learn about this perspective, Capitalism & Climate Change is what I’ll recommend they read. It’s not only a wonderful book to keep handy when you’re trying to win over your liberal friends and relatives but also an excellent resource for those who are already convinced that capitalism is the problem and revolution is the answer.

The only thing I wished for with Capitalism & Climate Change was more of it. Although Klein, aided by McMillan, does a masterful job of explaining infrared radiation, albedo, tipping points, surplus value, the overproduction crisis and creative destruction, only so much can be accomplished in 160 pages. I’m already looking forward to an expanded second edition.