Social Self-Defense Against the Impending Trump Coup

 

Written by Jeremy Brecher and first published at Labor Network for Sustainability 

President Donald Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power no matter who wins the election. What is to be done if Trump loses the election but refuses to concede? The purpose of this commentary is to stimulate discussion and preparation for how to overcome such a Trump coup. 

Even before the 2016 election, Donald Trump hinted that if he lost he might not accept the outcome. Now, far behind in the polls, Trump is taking action to disrupt the 2020 election and laying obvious groundwork for refusing to leave office if he loses. As this threat has moved from a hypothetical concern to an immediate fear, the media have been filled with stories about Trumpite plans for red state legislatures to overturn popular votes, destroy mail ballots, and send in the military to quell demonstrators defending the vote. 

But reports have also begun appearing about plans to defend the ballot and resist a Trump Coup d’état – an “executive usurpation” sometimes referred to as a “self-coup.”(1) This commentary gives a brief historical background on the effective use of “people power” to contest coups and stolen elections and reviews recent writing and organizing against a Trump Coup. It presents resistance to a Trump Coup not as primarily a matter of Biden vs. Trump or Democrats vs. Republicans, but rather as Social Self-Defense — a defense of society against an attack on the very things that make our life together possible.(2) 

Anti-Coups Have Succeeded 

Tyrannical regimes from Serbia to the Philippines to Brazil and many other places have been brought down by “people power” — nonviolent revolts that made society ungovernable and led to regime change. While the U.S. has a strong tradition of social movements based on people power, it does not have a tradition of using mass action and general strikes for the defense of democracy. However, in other countries where democratic institutions have been so weakened or eliminated that they provide no alternative to tyranny, such methods have emerged and been used effectively. 

There is now an extensive literature analyzing popular resistance to subversion of elections and other forms of coup d’état. The pioneer of such research was theorist and historian of nonviolence Gene Sharp. His Waging Nonviolent Struggle provides extensive analysis and many case studies of effective nonviolent resistance; his The Anti-Coup focuses in on the use of these methods against illegal seizures of government power.(3) It proposes such guidelines as: 

• Repudiate the coup and denounce its leaders as illegitimate 
• Regard all decrees and orders from the coup leaders contradicting established law as illegal and refuse to obey them 
• Keep all resistance strictly nonviolent – refuse to be provoked into violence 
• Noncooperate with the coup leaders in all ways

Steven Zunes’ Civil Resistance Against Coups analyzes the resistance to twelve coups and provides an expanded theoretical framework.(4) Sharp and Zunes provide invaluable background for anyone who contemplates resisting a possible Trump coup. Here are two examples that involve popular resistance to coups that utilized stolen elections: 

In 1988, despite the circumventing of electoral laws, repression of universities and media, and ethnic cleansing, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic was still holding elections of a sort. An activist group called Otpor formed around the goal of driving Milosevic from power and began hundreds of small actions of resistance around the country to counter pervasive fear of the regime. 

Its plan was that activists would compel the regime to call elections; they would create massive turnout around a united opposition candidate; they would join other nongovernmental organizations in carefully monitoring election results so they could document their victory; and they would use mass noncompliance – leading up to a general strike – if and when Milosevic refused to step down. 

In 2000, Otpor pushed 18 of Serbia’s squabbling opposition parties to form a coalition to support a unity candidate, promising to deliver 500,000 votes to the unity candidate but threatening to put 100,000 protesters at the door of any politician who betrayed the coalition. As elections approached, the regime called Otpor an “illegal terrorist organization”; police raided its offices and shut down independent radio and TV stations; each day an average of seven activists were arrested. 

Meanwhile, the opposition organized ten thousand election monitors. They announced exit polls showing Milosevic had been defeated by a 50% to 35% margin. Instead of accepting the results, Milosevic refused to leave office and demanded a run-off election. 

Otpor announced a deadline for Milosevic to concede and 200,000 people demonstrated in Belgrade. The opposition called on the population throughout the country to “perform any acts of civil disobedience they have at their disposal.” Miners struck; TV and radio stations opened their airwaves to opposition voices.  As the deadline approached, cars and trucks filled the highways heading toward Belgrade. 

Police put up roadblocks and were issued orders to shoot, but seeing the size of the convoys they abandoned their barricades. Half-a-million people gathered in Belgrade. Police fired tear gas, but when the crowd stood its ground riot police began running away or joining the crowd. The opposition candidate declared victory and Milosevic accepted his defeat. 

There are many other cases where popular action has forestalled or reversed efforts to subvert the outcome of a democratic election. After the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. in 1983, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos met growing protests. 

Marcos called a presidential election to be held in February, 1986. Aquino’s widow Corazon Aquino was backed by all major opposition parties. Marcos’ campaign included vote-buying and the murder of more than 70 opposition workers. On election day casting of fake ballots and falsification of returns was widely witnessed. 

Marcos claimed victory, but Mrs. Aquino met with opposition leaders and proposed a long nonviolent campaign of what she dubbed “people power.” Top military officers resigned, withdrew support from Marcos, recognized Aquino as the legitimate winner, and fled to military camps in Manilla. The city’s Roman Catholic Church leader appealed on nationwide radio for people to nonviolently protect the officers and prevent bloodshed. 

By midnight 50,000 surrounded the camps; two days later it was more than a million. Marcos ordered tanks and armored transports to attack. Nuns knelt in front of the tanks and priests climbed on them and led a million protesters – plus soldiers – in prayer. The troops turned back. Next day Marcos ordered another assault, but the commanding officer ordered his troops to return to their base. The military rebels announced that ninety percent of the Armed Forces had defected. Large crowds took over the government television station. 

The next day Marcos fled the country and Aquino was inaugurated president. Ever after mass nonviolent direct action has been known around the world as “People power.”(5)

How the Trump Coup Is Unfolding 

This summer a group called the Transition Integrity Project held a series of “war games” with more than 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders and other experts to review possible scenarios for the upcoming election and presidential transition. The result: 

We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. Recent events, including the President’s own unwillingness to commit to abiding by the results of the election, the Attorney General’s embrace of the President’s groundless electoral fraud claims, and the unprecedented deployment of federal agents to put down leftwing protests, underscore the extreme lengths to which President Trump may be willing to go in order to stay in office. 

Their likely scenarios included: Trump’s refusal to concede; Attorney General William Barr opening investigation of vote-by-mail fraud allegations and Democratic ties to antifa; and rival selection of pro-Trump electoral college slates by Republican state legislatures. Meanwhile Trump would call for armed supporters to challenge pro-Biden demonstrators, leading to multiple killings of demonstrators; Trump says he will invoke the Insurrection Act to teach anti-American terrorists a lesson. All this before Thanksgiving. 

Except in the case of a big Biden win, each scenario “reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse.” In two of the scenarios there was no agreement on the winner by Inauguration Day.(6) 

An extended article in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman released in late September presented evidence that Trump and Republican officials are already laying the groundwork for such scenarios. The disruption of the Post Office and the plans to intimidate voters and prevent full vote counting are already under way. Gellman maintains that after election day, “Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede,” and that he may “obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in the Congress.”

Preparations are already being made for red state legislators to replace elected members of the Electoral College with their own appointees. Barton spells out in detail this and many other strategies available and likely to be used to prevent a losing President Trump from being forced to leave office.(7)

 How to Overcome a Trump Coup 

In late September, four movement activists and experts on civil resistance issued a manual called Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy. Reminiscent of the Indivisible manual that helped launch the resistance to Trump in 2016, it presents a detailed plan for locally-based resistance to a Trump Coup.(8) It lays out various scenarios in which Trump refuses to leave office. It calls for forming community-based “election protection” groups. These can start immediately with meetings by a small core group that develops a response plan and recruits others to participate in it. 

These groups will “hold the line” that all votes must be counted; all irregularities must be investigated impartially and remedied; and election results must be respected, regardless of who wins. Public officials can be called on in advance to state their commitment to these principles. Violation of these “Red Lines” by Trump or other officials will trigger these groups into action. 

The guide provides sample meeting agendas, templates for “Power Maps” of forces to influence, tactics “brainstorming sheets,” and other planning tools. It outlines targeted action to “undermine the pillars of support” for an illegal Trump regime. It calls for mass popular mobilization based on disciplined nonviolence because “violence will backfire badly against the side that uses it.” 

It discusses tactics including displaying symbols of protest; engaging in demonstrations, marches, and nonviolent blockades; strikes of all kinds; deliberate work slowdowns; boycotts of all kinds; divestment; refusing to pay certain fees, bills, taxes, or other costs; or refusal to observe certain expected social norms or behaviors. 

Trade unionists Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jose La Luz have made a related proposal for organized labor to establish “pro-democracy volunteer brigades” in preparation for the election. 

We need volunteers who will assist with voter registration; mobilize in large numbers should law enforcement and right-wing militias show up at polling places in order to intimidate voters; block the right-wing from challenging legitimate voters and ballots; and lay the groundwork for massive civil disobedience should the Trump administration attempt to forestall the elections and/or refuse to recognize the results.(9)

Organizing So Far Against a Trump Coup 

The Trump presidency has been an era of mass resistance, an upwelling of direct action that came to be known as the Trump Resistance or simply The Resistance. A social science organization called the Crowd Counting Consortium listed more than eighty-seven hundred protests with six to nine million participants in the first year of the Trump administration, 90 percent opposing Trump’s agenda.(10) The Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd constituted the largest mass uprising in the U.S. in half a century with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants.(11) The base for contesting a Trump Coup is already in motion. 

At the start of September, a coalition of 50 organizations called the Fight Back Table, which includes Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, Color of Change, Indivisible, and MoveOn, established a post-election planning vehicle called the Democracy Defense Nerve Center. Taking off from the Transition Integrity Project war games, they have begun to chart out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as “mass public unrest.” 

They began to struggle with such questions as how do you maintain sustained strikes and occupations and what do you do if armed right-wing militias show up at polling places?(12)

A number of other groups have been mobilizing to forestall or overcome a Trump coup. Protect the Results, a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America supported by 80 other groups, is planning mass mobilization in more than 1,000 locations.(13) Keep Our Republic is organizing to support a “civic creed” to “Let all citizens vote. Let all votes be counted. Let the count stand.” 

The group Peoples Strike has issued a Pledge of Resistance committing to occupy civic squares on Wednesday, November 4th, to occupy state capitols on Saturday, November 7th, and to engage in “strategic rolling strikes” thereafter. No doubt other preparations are under way as well. 

Other sectors of society are also beginning to consider what their responsibilities will be if Trump refuses to concede electoral defeat. On September 25 AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released this statement about the post-election transition: 

The AFL-CIO categorically rejects all threats to the peaceful transition of power. The labor movement simply will not allow any breach of the U.S. Constitution or other effort to deny the will of the people. Union members across the political spectrum are united in our fundamental belief that the votes of the American people must always determine the presidency. America’s workers will continue to be steadfast in defense of our democracy in the face of President Trump’s antics, and we stand ready to do our part to ensure his defeat in this election is followed by his removal from office.(14) 

A recent New York Times article reported that: 

senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Mr. Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism.(15)

Several Pentagon officials said there could be resignations among many of Mr. Trump’s senior generals, starting at the top with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley, should troops be ordered into the streets at the time of the election. As we have seen in the opposition to the Serbian and Philippine electoral coups, the role of various sectors and levels of the military – from the brass to the privates — can be critical. 

But as revealed by the top brass’ second thoughts after the military was called in to provide Trump a photo op confrontation in Lafayette Square during a June Black Lives Matter demonstration, they are most likely to come to a sense of their responsibilities when they are called on to suppress peaceful protestors in the interests of a tyrant. 

Social Self-Defense 

Resisting the rise of tyranny will no doubt require sacrifice. After all, we are dealing with an aspiring tyrant who lionizes someone who shoots down demonstrators in the street. But that sacrifice will not be primarily on behalf of one political party vs. another, of Democrats vs. Republicans. It will be a defense of democracy – defense of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

Beyond that, it is the protection of that which makes our life together on earth possible. It is defense of the human rights of all people; of the conditions of our earth and its climate that make our life possible; of the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; of global cooperation to provide a secure future for our people and planet; and of our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Overcoming a Trump Coup is Social Self-Defense. 

Notes 

1.     From the Spanish autogolpe, used to describe cases in Latin America in the early 1960s. Sharp and Jenkins, Anti-Coup, p. 6. https://novact.org/2012/09/the-anti-coup-bruce-jenkins-and-gene-sharp/?lang=en.

2.     The term “Social Self-Defense” has its origin in the Polish Committee for Social Self-Defense which led to the creation of the Solidarity trade union and ultimately the dissolution of Poland’s Communist dictatorship. I have used it before to characterize the Trump Resistance. Jeremy Brecher, “Social Self-Defense: Protecting People and Planet against Trump and Trumpism,” https://www.labor4sustainability.org/uncategorized/social-self-defense-protecting-people-and-planet-against-trump-and-trumpism/.

3.     Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005).  Gene Sharp & Bruce Jenkins, The Anti-Coup (Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution). Sharp’s magisterial three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent) lays out how and why nonviolent direct action is able to work.

4.     Steven Zunes, Civil Resistance Against Coups: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (ICNC Monograph Series) https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Stephen-Zunes-Monograph_Final.pdf.

5.     Joshua Paulson, “People Power Against the Philippine Dictator – 1986,” in Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005), Ibid.

6.     “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7013152/Preventing-a-Disrupted-Presidential-Election-and.pdf and  Rosa Brooks, “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence – and a constitutional crisis,” Washington Post, September 3, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/?arc404=true.

7.     Barton Gellman, “What If Trump Refuses to Concede?,” The Atlantic, pre-released in late September from November, 2020 issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/ Much of the same material is covered and confirmed with additional details in David Smith, “Recipe for Chaos,” The Guardian, September 27, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/27/recipe-for-chaos-2020-election-threatens-snap-us-already-pushed-limit.

8.     Hardy Merriman, Ankur Asthana, Marium Navid, Kifah Shah. Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy. version 1.1. 2020.  http://holdthelineguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Hold-The-Line_-A-Guide-to-Defending-Democracy.pdf.

9.     Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jose Alejandro La Luz, “Organized Labor and the ‘Cold Civil War,’” Portside, September 17, 2020. https://portside.org/2020-09-17/organized-labor-and-cold-civil-war.

10.  The Trump Resistance and other mass opposition to Trump and Trumpism is recounted in Jeremy Brecher, Strike! Revised, Expanded, and Updated Edition (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2020) Chapter 12, “Harbingers.” https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1085.

11.  Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

12.  Sam Stein, “The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day,” The Daily Beast, September 8, 2020. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-left-secretly-preps-for-violence-after-election-day . Developing efforts against a Trump Coup are also described in Sasha Abramsky, “Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?,” The Nation, September 7, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-coup-elections-gop/.

13.  Sam Stein.

14.  Richard Trumka, “We Will Not Tolerate Any Constitutional Breach,” _AFL-CIO, September 25, 2020.  https://aflcio.org/press/releases/trumka-we-will-not-tolerate-any-constitutional-breach.

15.  Jennifer Steinhauer and Helene Cooper, “At Pentagon, Fears Grow That Trump Will Pull Military into Election Unrest,” New York Times, September 25, 2020. https://portside.org/2020-09-25/pentagon-fears-grow-trump-will-pull-military-election-unrest.

Ecosocialism and/or Degrowth?

 

Written by Michael Löwy and first published at Rise 

Ecosocialism and the de-growth movement are among the most important currents of the ecological left. Ecosocialists agree that a significant measure of de-growth in production and consumption is necessary in order to avoid ecological collapse. But they have a critical assessment of the de-growth theories because: a) the concept of “de-growth” is insufficient to define an alternative programme; b) it does not make clear if de-growth can be achieved in the framework of capitalism or not; c) it does not distinguish between activities that need to be reduced and those that need to be developed. 

It is important to take into account that the de-growth current, which is particularly influential in France, is not homogeneous: inspired by critics of the  consumer society, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and of the “technical system”, Jacques Ellul, it contains different political outlooks. There are at least two poles which are quite distant, if not opposed: on one side, critics of Western culture tempted by cultural relativism (Serge Latouche), on the other side, universalist left ecologists (Vincent Cheynet, Paul Ariés).  

Serge Latouche, who is well known worldwide, is one of the most controversial French de-growth theoreticians. For sure, some of his arguments are legitimate: demystification of “sustainable development”, critique of the religion of growth and “progress”, call for a cultural revolution. But his wholesale rejection of Western humanism, of the Enlightenment and of representative democracy, as well as his cultural relativism (no universal values) and his immoderate celebration of the Stone Age are very much open to criticism. 

But there is worse. His critique of ecosocialist development proposals for countries of the Global South – more clean water, schools and hospitals – as “ethnocentric”, “Westernizing” and “destructive of local ways of life”, is quite unbearable. Last but not least, his argument that there is no need to talk about capitalism, since this critique “has already been done, and done well, by Marx” is not serious: it is as if one would say that there is no need to denounce the productivist destruction of the planet because this has already been done, “and done well”, by André Gorz (or Rachel Carson). 

Nearer to the Left is the universalist current, represented in France by the journal La Décroissance (“The De-Growth”), even if one can criticize the French “republicanism” of some of its theoreticians (Vincent Cheynet, Paul Ariès). Unlike the first, this second pole of the de-growth movement has many points of convergence – despite occasional polemics – with the Global Justice movements (ATTAC), the ecosocialists and the radical left parties: extension of gratuity [goods, services, or amenities that are offered for free], predominance of use-value over exchange-value, reduction of labour time, struggle against social inequalities, development of “non-market” activities, reorganisation of production according to social needs and the protection of the environment.  

Many de-growth theoreticians seem to believe that the only alternative to productivism is to stop growth altogether, or to replace it by negative growth, i.e. to drastically reduce the excessively high level of consumption of the population by cutting by half the expenditure of energy, by renouncing individual houses, central heating, washing machines etc. Since these and similar measures of draconian austerity risk being quite unpopular, some of them – including such an important author as Hans Jonas, in his Principle Responsibility – play with the idea of a sort of “ecological dictatorship”. 

Against such pessimistic views, socialist optimists believe that technical progress and the use of renewable sources of energy will permit an unlimited growth and abundance, so that each can receive “according to his needs”. 

It seems to me that these two schools share a purely quantitative conception of – positive or negative – “growth”, or of the development of productive forces. There is a third position, which seems to me more appropriate: a qualitative transformation of development. This means putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on the production, on a large scale, of useless and/or harmful products: the armaments industry is a good example, but a great part of the “goods” produced in capitalism, with their inbuilt obsolescence, have no other usefulness but to generate profit for the big corporations. 

The issue is not “excessive consumption” in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on conspicuous acquisition, massive waste, mercantile alienation, obsessive accumulation of goods, and the compulsive purchase of pseudo-novelties imposed by “fashion”. A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, beginning with those which could be described as “biblical” – water, food, clothing, housing – but including also the basic services: health, education, transport, culture. 

How to distinguish the authentic from the artificial, factitious (artificially created) and makeshift needs? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation, i.e. advertisement. The advertising system has invaded all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies: not only food and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens, newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. 

Moreover, it wastes an astronomical amount of oil, electricity, labour time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials – all paid by the consumers – in a branch of “production” which is not only useless, from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs. While advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer associations. 

The criteria for distinguishing an authentic from an artificial need, is its persistence after the suppression of advertisement (Coca Cola!). Of course, during some years, old habits of consumption would persist, and nobody has the right to tell the people what their needs are. The change in the patterns of consumption is a historical process, as well as an educational challenge.

Some commodities, such as the individual car, raise more complex problems. Private cars are a public nuisance, killing and maiming hundreds of thousand people yearly on a world scale, polluting the air in the great towns, with dire consequences for the health of children and older people, and significantly contributing to climate change. However, they correspond to a real need, by transporting people to their work, home or leisure. 

Local experiences in some European towns with ecologically minded administrations show that it is possible, and approved by the majority of the population, to progressively limit the part of the individual car in circulation, to the advantage of buses and trams.  

In a process of transition to ecosocialism, where public transportation, above or underground, would be vastly extended and free of charge for the users, and where pedestrians and cyclists will have protected lanes, the private car would have a much smaller role than in bourgeois society, where it has become a fetishised commodity, promoted by insistent and aggressive advertisement, a prestige symbol, a sign of identity. In the US, a driving license is the recognized ID – and the centre of personal, social or erotic life. 

It will be much easier, in the transition to a new society, to drastically reduce the transportation of goods by trucks – responsible for terrible accidents, and high levels of pollution – replacing it by the train, or by what the French call ferroutage (trucks transported in trains from one town to the other): only the absurd logic of capitalist “competitivity” explains the dangerous growth of the truck-system.   

Yes, will answer the pessimists, but individuals are moved by infinite aspirations and desires, that have to be controlled, checked, contained and if necessary repressed, and this may need some limitations on democracy. Now, ecosocialism is based on a wager, which was already Marx’s: the predominance, in a society without classes and liberated of capitalist alienation, of “being” over “having”, i.e. of free time for the personal accomplishment by cultural, sportive, playful, scientific, erotic, artistic and political activities, rather than the desire for an infinite possession of products. 

Compulsive acquisitiveness is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology and by advertisement: nothing proves that it is part of an “eternal human nature”, as the reactionary discourse wants us to believe. As Ernest Mandel emphasized: “The continual accumulation of more and more goods (with declining “marginal utility”) is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behaviour. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations … all these become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied”.  

This does not mean that there will not arise conflicts, particularly during the transitional process, between the requirements of environmental protection and social needs, between ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures, particularly in the poor countries, between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources. 

Such contradictions are inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning, in an ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them, by a pluralist and open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a grassroots and participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors, but to permit self-correction, of its own mistakes, by society collectively. 

What could be the relations between ecosocialists and the de-growth movement? In spite of the disagreements, can there be an active alliance around common objectives? In a book published some years ago, La décroissance est –elle souhaitable? (“Is de-growth a desirable aim?”), French ecologist Stéphane Lavignotte proposes such an alliance. He acknowledges that there are many controversial issues between both viewpoints. 

Should one emphasize the social class relations and the struggle against inequalities or the denunciation of the unlimited growth of the productive forces? What is more important, individual initiatives, local experiences, voluntary simplicity, or changing the productive apparatus and the capitalist “mega-machine”?  

Lavignotte refuses to choose, and proposes to associate these two complementary practices. The challenge is, he argues, to combine the struggle for the ecological class interest of the majority, i.e. the non-owners of capital, and the politics of active minorities for a radical cultural transformation. In other words, to achieve, without hiding the inevitable disagreements, a “political composition” of all those who have understood that the survival of life on the planet and of humanity in particular are contradictory to capitalism and productivism, and therefore look for the way out of this destructive and inhumane system.  

As an ecosocialist, and as a member of the Fourth International, I share this viewpoint. The coming together of all varieties of anti-capitalist ecology is an important step towards the urgent and necessary task of stopping the suicidal course of the present civilisation – before it is too late… 

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazillian Marxist professor, author and activist. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). He co-authored the ‘International Ecosocialist Manifesto’ with Joel Kovel

Will COP26 Achieve anything Meaningful for the Ecological Crisis?

The next United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), delayed by the Covid 19 pandemic, will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, next year from 1 to 12 November 2021. It is the first time that the UK has hosted the conference, which will likely open against a backdrop of grim evidence that the planet’s ecology is under serious threat. Currently, the facts detail the scale of the looming disaster:

·        A global temperature increase of 0.85C against a 1951-1980 baseline, whilst being on course for global warming of an expected 4.1°C – 4.8°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

·       Atmospheric CO2 at 412.75 parts per million, when CO2 needs to kept to no more 350 ppm to avoid drastically rising temperatures.

·       The Greenland ice mass reduced by -4040 Giga Tonnes since 1992.

·       Arctic ice cover reduced by 2 million square metres since 1979.

·       A rise in sea levels of +69.21 mm since 1992.

Figures above supplied by The Guardian.

·       90% of the global population breathes air exceeding World Health Organisation exposure targets.

·       There are now close to 500 dead marine zones covering more than 245,000 km² globally, equivalent to the surface of the United Kingdom, caused by various pollutants.

·       The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, since 1900.

These statistics point to ecocatastrophe and possibly extinction for humanity and all other species on the planet. And all of this after 25 previous world conferences on these matters, so the chances of anything positive being agreed appear to be slim in the extreme, even with the stakes being so high.

The much heralded COP21 held in Paris in 2015, which was meant reduce CO2 emissions and so keep global temperatures below 2C, was largely a fraud. The Trump administration in the US has now pulled out of the agreement, but even if the US had remained committed to the actions agreed in Paris, it would have had little effect on rising emissions.

Some of the pledges included non-existent (on any large scale) technological fixes, like carbon sequestration, which are entirely meaningless.  

A report written by climate scientists in 2019, “The Truth Behind the Paris Agreement Climate Pledges,” concluded:

“Countries need to double and triple their 2030 reduction commitments to be aligned with the Paris target,” said Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and co-author of the report that closely examined the 184 voluntary pledges under the Paris Agreement.   

The report’s analysis of the 184 pledges found that almost 75 percent were insufficient. In fact, the world’s first and fourth biggest emitters, China and India, will have higher emissions in 2030. The US is the second largest and its pledge was too low. Russia, the fifth largest emitter, hasn’t even bothered to make a pledge. The European Union is likely to exceed its pledges, but not by the margin required for it to be effective.

Given the seriousness of the situation, why is there such reluctance to take the necessary mitigating actions from the worst offenders? And secondly, why do environmental campaigners, especially the large NGOs put so much effort into these useless conferences?

The industrial capitalist states and their corporations that produce most CO2 emissions in their production processes, make a lot money out of the status quo. These processes require huge energy inputs, which mostly comes from burning fossil fuels, as it is the cheapest and most reliable source of this energy.

Fossil fuel produced energy can be produced close to where it is needed too, reducing transmission losses, unlike renewable sources, which in the main need to be produced further away from the point of use, and will lose power on the way, even if enough could be produced for the system’s ever expanding needs. The imperative to grow, or die is inherent to the capitalist system.

As for the environmental campaigners, they really can’t see the wood for the trees, if you will forgive the pun, when it comes to inadequate pledges on emissions reduction, and buy into false techno solutions and ‘market based’ solutions like carbon trading, which have failed wherever they have been tried. The 100% clean energy movement led by the US based Sierra Club with a $80 million donation by billionaire capitalist Michael Bloomberg, has created a renewable front for natural gas.

In the UK, the prime minister, Boris Johnson last week announced a plan to power all UK homes from off-shore wind farms by 2030. It is not clear whether this means replacing natural gas for heating, as well as current electrical demand, but it seems a tall order if it does. Not to mention, other buildings, transport, industry and farming power supplies. At the same time, his government has made fracking licences easier to obtain by businesses that extract shale gas.

All demand for power will grow as it does inevitably under a system that requires ever expanding markets to survive. All those new gadgets and those to come, need energy to operate them, as well that used to produce them.

The problem to a large extent is that people just can’t imagine a world run other than by capitalism. This is what Joel Kovel, the ecosocialist writer refers to as the ‘force-field’ of the system, and so all attempted solutions to climate change and other ecological ills, have to fit with capitalism. Which in turn means they will not be effective, and tend to be piecemeal or green washing fantasies.

Perhaps another recent announcement by the UK government reveals that the ruling classes are only too well aware of this. Government tells English schools not to use anti-capitalist material for teaching leaves me with the impression that they don’t want the young, who are most likely to have ecological concerns, to join up the dots and reveal the truth about how the world is run. Censorship never works, especially in these days of the world wide web. These dots will be joined, or we will have no future worth living.  

For an Egalitarian, Cooperative Road to an Ecosocialist Future

 

This important Ecosocialist Manifesto, published by the Green Left emerges out of Australia in preparation for the forthcoming conference, Ecosocialism 2020: From rebellion to revolution, supported by the Socialist Alliance. It will be open for further discussion and development through a series of Ecosocialism conferences in several cities across Australia in late October.

We are in the midst of a climate emergency and there is no way out without radically changing the way society is organized. If humanity does not free itself from the capitalist drive for ever greater profits and ever-expanding economic growth, rising global temperatures alone will make the planet uninhabitable for humans and millions of other living species.

We urgently need to find a collective road to a new way of living that is based on human solidarity and ecological sustainability.

1. The Emergency is Now

Catastrophic fires, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and the shocking collapse of biodiversity are a reality after just 1°C of global warming. At current rates of greenhouse gas global emissions we are heading for 2–3°C rise.

Despite numerous warnings from the world’s leading scientists, none of the global climate summits have produced the targets, let alone actions, needed to address the climate emergency.

The governments of a number of rich countries – including the United States and Australia – are defending the profit greed of the giant fossil fuel companies. They are also stubbornly resisting calls for binding and effective greenhouse gas emission cuts and for the richest countries to pay the climate debt owed to the rest of the world that they have ruthlessly exploited and oppressed for generations.

The climate emergency is just part of the historic clash between the capitalist system and nature.

Corporate greed has destroyed entire ecosystems and poisoned land and seas with toxic waste. Land clearing, driven by capitalist agribusiness, has robbed the planet of the forest cover needed to absorb carbon dioxide and provide a home for many species. It has also unleashed deadly new pandemics, such as COVID-19.

The climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic are symptoms of the dangerous rift that capitalism has created with nature and which it continues to exacerbate.

But the COVID-19 pandemic also shows us that the privileged ruling elites and the majority they exploit and oppress cannot carry on in the old way.

The huge death toll from COVID-19 in the US, the world’s richest and most powerful country, demonstrates that even the most privileged will not be spared the impact of the existential crisis that capitalism has created.

2. We Need to Move Beyond Capitalism to Ecosocialism

Just 100 fossil fuel corporations account for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Leading climate activist Greta Thunberg has pointed out that the capitalist class has already contracted out a lot more than the world’s carbon budget, which the Paris Agreement said is needed to keep global warming to 1.5°C.

Attempts by the climate summits to find capitalist-friendly solutions to the climate emergency have not worked. “Market solutions,” such as carbon trading, have failed even in the few capitalist states where they have been implemented. Any “greening” of capitalism, that such market solutions may have encouraged, is too little and too late.

To pull back from catastrophic climate change requires emergency action to democratize the economy. To do this, critical industries such as energy, transport, agribusiness and the financial institutions that invest in them need to be brought under social control – now.

This will be necessary to move rapidly to 100% renewable energy and to reduce net carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible.

This all points to the urgent need to replace capitalism with an ecosocialist society, that could address gross injustices and repair capital’s rift with nature.

The corporate rich, that now rule the world, stole much of their starting capital directly or indirectly through colonial plunder. They destroyed numerous societies around the globe, many of whom were organized for thousands of years around Indigenous social values of egalitarianism, cooperation and co-existence with nature.

An ecosocialist future would require a return to such principles, with the benefit of technological advances used for social good.

Under capitalism, almost every technological advance is used to deepen the exploitation of the majority and nature, or to build dangerous weapons of mass destruction and suppression.

An ecosocialist society would liberate human creativity through translating productivity gains into a radically shorter working week. This is also necessary to free the majority of the population – now exploited to the point of exhaustion or discarded as surplus labour – to exercise direct democratic control of society.

An ecosocialist society will need to be based on grassroots direct democracy that allows communities to have real control over their destinies.

3. Capitalism’s Violent Defense of Power and Privilege

The giant corporations are using all their power and privilege to defend their narrow interests – even as it becomes increasingly clear that humanity cannot carry on as before.

They buy off governments or remove any that challenge their interests. They promote and fund climate denialist, racist, misogynist and nakedly fascist movements.

They have already plunged entire nations into permanent war to protect their right to plunder and exploit the world. Now, they are even supporting violent right-wing forces in the US threatening civil war.

They are prepared to use the disproportionate military power of the US and its rich country allies to preserve a grossly unequal capitalist global division of labour and a presumed “right” to continue passing the costs of the ecological crisis on to the poorest countries.

They are resisting calls for reparations to be paid to those countries they have plundered and poisoned. They are blocking calls for rich countries to adopt sharper and deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and for renewable technologies to be shared across the globe.

4. Building a Movement for Ecosocialist Revolution

A new mass movement for ecosocialist revolution needs to be built from the radicalizing climate emergency movement and other progressive mass movements, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement, that are challenging the capitalist system in the face of rising fascist movements, racism, sexism and attacks on civil liberties.

In all these movements, we hear calls to end capitalism and build a new future based on the collective and ecologically sustainable traditions that capitalism has tried its best to wipe out over the last 400 years.

Ecosocialists seek to unite and amplify those voices for real change.

History teaches us that people’s political consciousness can develop rapidly in the process of sustained collective struggle and that such movements act as schools of direct democracy. They can also give birth to new institutions of popular democracy.

Therefore, it is of critical importance to build mass movements around programs of immediate and transitional measures that the climate emergency demands.

The radical green new deal programs, championed by former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the US Green Party and US Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, are examples for such a program.

But the system change potential of any such transitional program can only be realized by an independent mass movement that goes beyond the limits of electoral campaigns.

The deepening crisis that we are confronting today makes it clear that time is of the essence.

The time to stop capitalism from destroying our common future is running out. The need to build this mass movement for change means we urgently need to build ecosocialist organizations and global networks that can unite their impact.

Book Review – Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today

 

Written by Javier Sethness and first published at Marx and Philosophy

The cover art for Ecology and Revolution, centering Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring, is a fitting representation of Charles Reitz’s concept of the common human essence: “sensuous living labor.” In his development of this idea, Reitz contests masculinist, militarist, and state-apologist accounts of human origins in pre-history, by instead centering cooperation, care, interdependence, partnership, hospitality, communal labor, and humanistic communication as emergent powers that have ensured our survival from our collective birth millions of years ago to our own day.

In this sense, the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were right to observe that “all reification”—all ossification of authority, all dehumanization, “is a forgetting.” Ethically, Reitz counterposes egalitarian partnership power as an institutional-cultural practice that can prefigure a future community characterized by solidarity and difference without inequality, in place of the various hierarchies that dominate the world today.

Furthermore, he recovers Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of labor against reductionist and disingenuous accounts that misinterpret the theorist’s works as being elitist and pessimistic. Dialectically, then, Ecology and Revolution is a fitting testament to Marcuse’s legacy of championing classical education, as based on the hope that the humanities can inspire students to contemplate the meaning of life and mobilize to transform the world.

For Reitz, sensuous living labor has ensured that humanity has endured through the ages, and it portends future global self-emancipation through an anti-racist, feminist, green commonwealth. This proposal for a commonwealth, which for Reitz would amount to a Hegelian “determinate negation,” is the author’s answer to “the challenge and necessity of building an alternate world system today.”

Reitz’s project, like Marcuse’s, is therefore “multi-dimensional, dialectical, realistic, and normative,” as well as politically therapeutic: as Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm did in the past, so Reitz today seeks to wield critical theory to “actually eliminate” the exploitation, “injury[,] and suffering,” “economic want, political unfreedom, and ecological distress” all endemic to capitalist, racist, and sexist domination and the growth fetish (6-11, 37).

Following his collective mentors, the Frankfurters, Reitz avows that the supreme duty of the intellectual is to investigate human (self)destructiveness, and to agitate for a liberated world in which life is to be enjoyed for all, rather than constrained along the existing social gradient. Hence, his proposed Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive against ecological ruin and the “preventative counterrevolution.” (Marcuse anticipated Reaganism before his death, which is now enshrined in Trumpism and global authoritarian-populist reaction.)

This commonwealth as ideal also communicates the Marcusean concept of the Great Refusal, namely, the “activist opposition to needless institutional destructiveness and advocacy for goals connected to utopian practices of human freedom,” defined concretely by Reitz as “a global alliance of transformational forces in pursuit of a life-affirming and humanist future of intercultural solidarity within a new eco-socialist political order” (2, 12).

The struggle to realize such a commonwealth is not without its challenges. Besides the threats of statist-militarist repression or homelessness and premature death with which workers, youth, and oppressed people must grapple when contemplating direct action as redress, proponents of this commonwealth confront the one-dimensionality of capitalist “culture,” which reduces the human experience to a one sidedness that serves the exigencies of profit. Workers and oppressed people thus have their attention diverted by the machinic grinding of a false society (Gesellschaft) and an economic, even libidinal, fixation on “subtle (and harmless) banalities” coordinated by vested interests (7, 83).

As a result of this one-dimensional coordination (Gleichschaltung), which originated with Nazi expectations of socio-political conformity, and which also resemble the Stalinist concept of a “party line,” the second—or aesthetic—dimension is eclipsed, with human consciousness and the possibilities of a new, human community (Gemeinschaft) blunted.

However, even within the “totally administered society” of globalized monopoly capitalism, art still retains the promise of protest against dehumanization, and the specter of liberation, by confidently inspiring a new sensibility, according to Adorno and Marcuse. The depressed and/or protesting artist, youth, worker, and/or racial, gender, or sexual minorities of our day subversively personify the “unhappy consciousness.”

As a central feature of Gleichschaltung, Marcuse identified a tendency toward “repressive desublimation,” by which he meant a process whereby erotic and psychical energies are “satisfied,” and the capitalist system reproduced, through the fetishism of commodities and the reification of social life. (As dysfunctional means of compensating for one’s individual and collective exploitation and alienation, indeed, Facebook and Trumpism provide especially dangerous contemporary examples of this dynamic.)

Through his late engagement with Rudolf Bahro, Marcuse reinterpreted the problem as a struggle between emancipatory and compensatory needs, and a “counter-” or “surplus” versus affirmative consciousness, akin to the Freudian dance of Eros and Thanatos.

In Ecology and Revolution, Reitz rescues the Marcusean philosophy of labor against bad-faith attacks on the critical theorist’s supposed rendering-invisible of workers. Reviewing the record, Reitz shows how Marcuse retained a Marxian faith in socialism, understood as workers’ self-organization for emancipation, while radically deprovincializing post-war U.S. society through cultural critique and political activism. Similarly turning received opinion on its head, Reitz discusses how the world of work should be overhauled, given that employees effectively pay their employers! 

In fact, in 2014, capital was shown to be appropriating three times (75%) as much as labor received (25%) of the total value added in U.S. manufacturing, while the richest one-fifth of U.S. households were found in 2012 to own 85% of all wealth (31-5). As Reitz comments, these brutally oligarchical wealth distributions have persisted almost unchanged since the onset of Reaganism and the neoliberal era.

Thus far, Reitz and I are in full agreement about the critical importance of Marcusean philosophy, partnership power, and the cooperative green commonwealth. However, I would be remiss to avoid discussing some theoretical critiques and disagreements in this review.

First, as regards Reitz’s commitment to racial equality, I question whether Lukács was an anti-racist (9). How so? I appreciate his critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s irrationalism as effectively functioning as apologism for Nazi imperialism, together with his deconstruction of commodity fetishism in History and Class Consciousness.

As with Vladimir Lenin, though, Lukács’ aristocratic and ahistorical view of the limits of workers’ “mere spontaneity” (16), and his attendant prescription for a vanguard party in this early text, are commensurate with the Stalinism he espoused in his later years, after participating in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Reitz’s engagement with Lukács raises the questions of revolutionary strategy and transition: whether these should be libertarian or authoritarian.

In parallel, Reitz presents Marcuse as echoing Nietzsche’s “cultural radicalism” with his affirmation of a transvaluation of values and a new sensibility, but also dismisses Nietzsche along with Max Stirner and Ayn Rand as an egoist (23, 109, 150). Given Marcuse’s commitment to humanism, idealism, and rationalism, such a discrepancy requires further clarification. Nietzsche’s neo-fascist enthusiasts of today, such as Richard Spencer and Alexander Dugin, would likely contest Reitz’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s ostensible call for “the supersession of masters and slaves,” raising difficult questions about the causes of gender and racial equality, the liberation of labor, leisure, abundance, and peace (119-120; Beiner).

Moreover, the author arguably inflates Lenin’s theoretical importance by alluding to “What Is To Be Done?” (1902) without mentioning its 1863 antecedent novel of the same name, written by the anarcho-Populist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Ecology and Revolution too lacks the unambiguous critiques of Leninist despotism, and of the obvious continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, that Marcuse features in Soviet Marxism. In a similar vein, Peter Kropotkin is not mentioned once—this, despite the fact that the Freudo-Marcusean emphasis on Eros, Reitz’s concept of sensuous living labor, and the call for partnership power and commonwealth are entirely consistent with Kropotkin’s account of mutual aid.

Reitz’s enthusiastic citation of Che Guevara’s thoughts on love from “Socialism and Man in Cuba” is puzzling (93, 107-8), considering that Fromm’s humanistic concept of love as a productive character orientation is far superior to Guevara’s own. Whereas Reitz sees Guevara as an advocate of platonic political love and, presumably, a principled revolutionary, the contradiction between expressing affection for one’s fellow guerrilleros and the tactical and strategic advocacy of sadomasochistic hatred, bureaucracy, and militarism should be striking (Fromm; Guevara).

Continuing with the question of revolutionary strategy, it bears noting that Marx summarily expelled the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the First International in 1871, wrecking the organization in the process (Berthier; Graham). That Reitz guards silence over this destructive historical episode, while praising past authoritarian-populist and neo-extractivist “Pink Tide” governments in Ecuador (led by Rafael Correa) and Bolivia (led by Evo Morales), shows the poverty of statist approaches (Tilzey).

Moreover, if it is true that the differences between Marx and Bakunin were not just political and strategic, but also sexual, in that Bakunin may have been expelled at least in part over a rumored gay affair with Sergei Nechaev (Kennedy), this would further undermine the credibility of the stated commitment to sexual diversity made by critical Marxists such as Reitz—beyond the distrust already engendered by idealizing open heterosexists such as Guevara.

In contrast, I consider Marcuse a steadfast LGBT ally, particularly given his avowal of an “Orphic Marxism” in Eros and Civilization. Furthermore, Reitz’s endorsement of Kohei Saito’s attempt at defending Marx against the charge of Prometheanism is unconvincing, as Marcuse himself recognized the “hubris of domination” toward nature evident in Marx’s work in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). Still, the author’s incorporation of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is to be commended as a necessary corrective.

Perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of a collective survival strategy for humanity, Reitz outlines the meaning of his proposal for a Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive through calls for “shared ownership, democratized ownership, common ownership,” and “stewardship,” together with a newfound honoring of treaties with Indigenous peoples, restitution of lands, and reparations, and generalized decommodification through basic incomes (36-9, 69, 160). This is all very much welcome.

My main question is whether the green commonwealth envisions wielding the State to achieve its goals. At one point, Reitz defines commonwealth as “as a governmental and economic power,” and declares that he finds “desirable” Immanuel Wallerstein’s goal of “socialist world government,” but then he praises Marcuse as a council communist and uses the modifier “self-governing” to describe the “cosmopolitan green commonwealth” (31, 40, 46n3, 106, 113, emphasis added).

The resolution of such ambiguities is critical for the actual project of organizing this much-needed Green Common-Wealth Counter-Offensive, considering that advocacy of a statist strategy—even “transitional”—would contradict the critique of dehumanization and reification, not to mention inevitably undermine the delineated goals, as the historical experiences of social-democrat, Pink-Tide reformists and bureaucratic, state-capitalist regimes like the Soviet Union have shown us.

In conclusion, Reitz in Ecology and Revolution provides readers with convincing arguments for the “ongoing validity of Marcuse’s Great Refusal”; the place of sensuous living labor in sustaining and remaking the world; and the importance of intercultural solidarity, emancipatory needs, the second dimension, and counter-consciousness (180).

The project of creating a liberatory commonwealth will be expansive and multi-faceted, and it can benefit from engagement with proposals like green and community syndicalism, anarchism, social reproduction theory, and artistic movements such as solarpunk. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, upending the normal operation of capitalist exploitation, the “reification of the proletariat” is increasingly less apparent. But will the “global self-conscious subject” succeed in organizing itself to intervene before it is too late? Only future historians will be able to tell.

References

• Ronald Beiner (2018) Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Rene Berthier (2012) Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864-1877. London: Merlin Press.
• Erich Fromm (2006) The Art of Loving New York: HarperCollins
• Ernesto Guevara (1961) Guerrilla Warfare New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Hubert Kennedy (1995) “Johann Baptist von Schweitzer: The Queer Marx Loved to Hate.” Journal of Homosexuality vol. 29, no. 2/3, 69-96.
• Mark Tilzey (2019) “Authoritarian Populism and Neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: The Unresolved Agrarian Question and the Prospects for Food Sovereignty as Counter-Hegemony.” Journal of Peasant Studies 46 (3): 626–652

The New Climate Normal: Capitalism is Killing the Planet

 Written by Rebecca Green and first published at Socialist Alternative

In almost every metric to measure extreme weather, the Earth is breaking record after record, from the hottest heat waves to the worst fires to one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. This is the new normal and yes, this is climate change.

Millions have been evacuated, and hundreds of thousands have lost their homes to fires and flooding since COVID-19, a pandemic that itself foreshadows the dangers of unfettered environmental degradation. Across the West Coast, under menacing orange skies, people have been forced indoors to avoid toxic smoke from historic fires in the middle of a respiratory pandemic.

The fires and smoke have created a dramatic sense of fear and dread among a huge section of the population not just in California, but in Washington State and Oregon as well. While millions, especially young people, see the need for immediate, dramatic action, there is also an overwhelming sense of fear that we’re out of time.  

The two main political parties in the U.S. stand squarely in the way of the seismic change that is necessary. The only way out of this crisis is if we do it ourselves, and involve millions in the process of democratically planning and building an environmentally sustainable, socialist society. 

Extreme Weather Unchecked

As global temperatures rise, dry climates become drier, creating more fuel for fires out of scorched fields, forests, and debris. Warmer weather also means that in wetter climates, the air can hold more moisture, meaning that tropical storms and hurricanes come with more threat of flooding. Even if we went 100% carbon neutral tomorrow, extreme weather would continue. While we need to stop this crisis at its source, we also need to adapt to a new climate norm.

One piece of this is ramping up and fixing our broken forest management and wildfire response. Wildfires are natural in places like California, but an “if-it-burns-extinguish-it” approach for decades has prevented fires that would have cleared debris now being gobbled up by megafires.

Combine this with decades of underfunding, reliance on prison labor to fight fires (who were in short supply because of COVID-19 outbreaks), and you have California desperately appealing to other states and even Australia to send firefighters. We need full funding for wildfire response and forest management – including controlled burns.

While we need adequate resources to respond to climate threats, we also need to reconsider where we can live and work. If carbon emissions continue as they are, in 30 years half a million homes will flood each year. By 2070, 28 million people will be impacted by Manhattan-sized megafires.

And yet, since 2010 in coastal states, the most flood-prone areas have seen the highest rates of home construction, and development is continuing in areas hit by wildfires on the West Coast. 

Developers have continuously pushed back against building codes that would require things like fire and impact proof windows, which often make the difference between a home sustaining some damage or being completely leveled. 

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is playing a disappearing act. Last year, California officials had to ban insurers from cancelling policies for 800,000 homes. Hundreds of thousands are being dropped by their insurance companies because insurance is just not profitable when a house burns down or floods. 

People don’t need for-profit insurance – we should be ensuring all people have affordable high-quality housing with the promise of relief in the case of any natural disaster. This would include fire proof windows and metal roofs in fire-prone areas, and high-quality metal shutters and hurricane straps to secure walls to rafters in coastal areas. The insurance industry is a shoddy substitute for social services. 

Instead, we need a massive jobs program that could put millions back to work in high-quality union jobs building affordable, sustainable housing and retrofitting homes to withstand extreme weather funded by taxing the rich.

No Time to Wait

The Republican Party and Donald Trump are obvious threats to the environment, but the criminal negligence of the Democratic Party that controls California, Oregon, and Washington is life-threatening too. With one hand, California Governor Gavin Newsom mandates cars be fossil-fuel free by 2035.

With the other, he has approved 36 new fracking permits since COVID-19 began. In July, he cut pay for firefighters by 7.5%. In May, budget cuts from his emergency pandemic budget meant CalFire added just 167 firefighters to its ranks, instead of the 500 they requested, which is itself far short of what they need. 

Newsom also opposes raising taxes on the wealthiest in the state – so where, then, is the money for wildfire response supposed to come from? 

Joe Biden has a far-reaching climate plan compared to those of Democrats past, but it still falls wildly short of what is necessary, and he still doesn’t support a Green New Deal. To win even his modest measures, Biden and the Democrats would need to directly take on the fossil fuel industry, developers, and major polluting industries, which they continually refuse to do. 

Just 100 fossil fuel producers are responsible for 70% of emissions from the last two decades – is it any wonder they promote individual lifestyle change as a solution? The billionaires that have run our planet into the ground have known about climate change for decades, and they know it’s getting worse.

As long as our society is run on the basis of profit, we will have to battle moneyed interests every single step of the way to win the most modest changes. And as long as our two political parties are both beholden to these corporate interests, we’ll have to fight them too. 

We don’t have time to let them slow us down anymore: to avoid full-scale climate meltdown, we have to completely do away with the system of capitalism. Private utilities and fossil fuel companies should be taken into democratic public ownership.

We need to build on the youth climate movement that has brought millions into the street to fight for our futures. To win, we will need a mass, revolutionary movement of the working class, the class that can bring society to a grinding halt and build it up from the ground again, on a sustainable basis. 

We demand:

• Develop controlled burning practices as part of forest management, consulting indigenous communities who have used this practice for centuries.  

• Workers should have the right to refuse non-essential work in areas with poor air quality!  

• Bring private utilities and major fossil fuel companies into democratic, public ownership. They should be immediately retooled for renewable energy sources. 

• A new political party that rejects fossil fuel money, and builds movements to fight for a Green New Deal and dramatic climate action NOW! 

• System change not climate change: the system of capitalism will continue exploiting the planet in the interest of profit. It also relies on the exploitation of the working class and particularly oppressed groups, who disproportionately suffer from the effects of climate change. To save our planet, and to rid our society of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all forms of oppression, we have to fight for the socialist transformation of society, and rebuild on an equitable, sustainable basis for all!

The Struggle for Use-Value – Thoughts About the Ecosocialist Transition

I have recently been reading ‘The Emergence of Ecosocialism,’ a collection of essays written by the now sadly departed Joel Kovel. Edited by Quincy Saul, and published in 2018, the book is reviewed more fully here, here and here on this blog.

In Kovel’s essay which goes by almost the same title as this post, (I've added Ecosocialist for clarity) first published at Capitalism Nature Socialism in 2000, he argues that the expansion of the notion of ‘use-value’ is a prerequisite for establishing an ecosocialist economic and social system to replace capitalism. The task becomes more urgent every day, as the evidence mounts of the acceleration of devastating climate change, wrought by our current, unsustainable, political economy.

In the introduction to the essay Kovel writes:

The chief selling point of capitalism is its phenomenal success at creating wealth in the commodity form. But the same success creates poverty and gathering ecocatastrophe. An ecologically rational society, by contrast, will have to turn away from the entire complex by means of which we have become enslaved by commodities. To do this, ecosocialism, - the name for such a society – will have to redefine the nature of wealth, and the way people under capitalism have come to define self-worth by the accumulation of commodities.

Capitalism sees nature, and humanity, as a field for exploitation to create commodities, which through ‘exchange-value’ is converted into capital, which increases the capacity for further exploitation and further capital extraction, and so on, indefinitely. The capitalist system ensures the efficient regulation of this process, whilst the capitalist state regulates access to the conditions of production, nature (land), humanity (labour) and infrastructure (the built environment).

Within this process, exchange value, which has no value in itself, needs to conjugate, to use Kovel’s term, with use-value to give it value. No one will be interested in things with no use-value, of course, but exchange-value sits like a parasite upon use-value. 

For example, a field can be used to produce food when human labour plants the seeds, water and tend to the crops. The food produced has a clear use-value, we need to eat food to survive, and any farm animals also need to be fed, to produce further food and perhaps animal labour. At which point the produce of the farm attains an exchange-value. People will buy the food, which then produces capital for the land owner as profit, or to use the Marxist term, surplus value.

The use-value of food is obvious, and the capitalist system will seek to produce more of this surplus value, because it needs to grow to survive, which leads to what is referred to as 'efficiencies', the use of machinery for example, reducing labour costs to get even more surplus value from the same patch of land. Fertilisers and pesticides will need to be used also to increase the yield, which in turn degrades the land and the wider environment. Which means more will need to be used, and so on.

With some commodities, like the various gadgets that are continually produced have a less clear ‘use-value,’ but the capitalist system manipulates people’s wants through the fashion and marketing / advertising industries. We all too often have a desire for novelty as a species, and the system exploits this, when often these goods in themselves have very limited use-vale, but become the latest must have thing.

Kovel writes:

For capital, the ideal world would be one in which everything useful – the air, the water we drink, the songs we whistle to ourselves – would in fact be the occasion of a commodity. Air is still largely free, though there is a brisk trade in purification devices and elements of it like oxygen; while water, as we know, has become increasingly commodified and in certain locales costs more than gasoline.at the supermarket. The ecological crisis has created new ground for commodity formation, which is just fine so far as ruling interests are concerned.

What would a prefigurative ecosocialism look like then? To take our example of a field used to grow food. If the farming was of an organic nature, not dispensing fertilisers and pesticides, it would be moving towards ecosocialism. And what if it was run as a cooperative, with equal shares for all in the cooperative and therefore with no surplus value being appropriated? This again would move this type of ensemble towards ecosocialism.

This is far from supplanting exchange-value with use-value but is an example of how things could be run differently, and make the idea less utopian, that it might otherwise be seen, making it more attainable. Kovel says these ways of production can be seen as stepping stones to ecosocialism. These two examples also bridge the issues of land and labour, which can be seen as bringing them together, eco and socialism.

Kovel again:

The restoration of use-values is first of all, no simple atavism, that is, we do not seek to recapture some original goodness of use-value in things before capital subordinated them to exchange value. Use-value is a kind of relationship; it signifies appropriation between humanity and nature, and within humanity as part of nature, and cannot be reduced to any crude or absolute measure of worth.

Kovel adds that this type of working can address what Marx called the alienation of labour, resulting from capitalist productive processes and the extraction of surplus value from the workers. Thus the restoration of the use-value of human labor points toward the emancipation of the worker from capital.

Kovel then turns his attention to the concept of usufruct, quoting by Marx’s now well known amongst ecosocialists words on the matter from Capital Volume 3:

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and, like bona patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

Usufruct means the right to use and enjoy. Kovel informs us that the term appeared in the English language in the early seventeenth century but has applied in many historical cultures going back to the Code of Hammurabi. In England, it referred to rights to use common land in the transition toward enclosure of this land. It allowed the common right to use the ‘property’ of someone else for income as well as leisure, while not damaging it in anyway. Could this concept be employed in a reverse transition away from private propety and towards ecosocialism?

I will leave the last word to Kovel:

If ecosocialism can offer a usufructory of the earth, it will be one of employment, the aesthetic dimension and improvement.