From the Depths of the Pandemic towards an Ecosocialist Utopia

Written by Martin Aidnik and first published at ROAR

In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need bold and imaginative thinking — it is time to embrace the utopianism that is implicit to the Marxist tradition.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging our carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

— Arundhati Roy

Socialism is one of the great visions of a society in the modern era. Born in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the early days of industrialization, socialism is about achieving freedom and equality in real, practical terms. Socialism envisions a society based on cooperation, which meets the needs of all of its members. It recognizes that everyday practices, especially work, need to be democratically organized and freed from necessity in order for people to find fulfilment in social existence. Emancipation — the liberation of social life from structural constraints — is the task that sustains socialist aspirations.

How does the wisdom of socialism, both in its Marxian and ecological forms, apply to our own time — the time of COVID-19 and climate emergency?

COVID-19, a deadly virus wreaking havoc across borders and continents, has put the capitalist world under a magnifying glass. It has amplified structural deficiencies and inequalities and showed us how systematic efforts to maximize wealth have undermined the health of society as a whole. Under the reign of neoliberalism, this has led to neglect of the resilience of health care systems as well as a steady shrinking of the entire public sector. With its seismic impact, COVID-19 underscores the need for socialist transformation.

At the same time, there is the planetary and existential issue of climate emergency. A recent United Nations report states that “despite a brief dip in the global carbon dioxide emission as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the planet is still heading for a global temperature in excess of 3 degrees Celsius this century.” It has thus become clear that only a radical transformation can save humanity and the planet from the ruin. Changes within the capitalist system will not suffice. Instead, a transition to socialism is necessary as it is socialism which can establish the conditions in which both human and non-human life can not only survive, but also thrive.

A convergence between Marxian socialism and ecosocialism can help us envision a remedy to the deep troubles of our time. In this essay, I take utopia as that convergence. As articulated by the maverick philosopher, Ernst Bloch, the Marxist tradition is implicitly utopian. In this “warm stream” of the Marxist tradition, utopia provides orientation and explores the realm of the possible. It is first and foremost a catalyst for social change. It propels agency in the form of forward-looking thought, critique and engagement with the status quo. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, what is called for is bold and imaginative thinking. In order to live up to this task, ecosocialism should embrace utopianism.

The Scientific Socialism of Marx and Engels

The Marxian critique of capitalism remains unsurpassed and is more relevant 150 years after its invention than it should be. In Capital, Marx argues that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and undertakes an extensive investigation of these contradictions. By turning labor into a commodity, capitalism erodes the difference between things and human beings. Capitalism creates unprecedented wealth but degrades the proletariat. Along with his collaborator Engels, Marx also sought to contribute to the formation of a working-class consciousness. Their theory is decidedly partisan to bringing about social change.

In contrast, earlier utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon were idealists. They believed that society can be changed by appealing to all classes on the basis of reason and justice. They did not appeal directly to the working class, in part because they feared inciting unrest. But for Marx and Engels, political struggle was the only viable way.

In order to avoid the charge of being seen as daydreamers who were merely building “castles in the air,” Marx and Engels were keen to label their socialism “scientific.” According to Engels, one of the key theoretical innovations that turned Marx’s socialism from utopian to scientific is his materialist conception of history or “historical materialism.” Historical materialism postulates that different realms of society are interconnected and determined by the economic structure. The possibilities of social transformation depend on the material conditions of each epoch.

Yet Marxian socialism also has its own a utopian character. This consists chiefly in the transcendence of alienation through a classless socialist society. In such a state of freedom, human beings can develop and flourish as fully-actualized individuals. A socialist society would be both free and equal, built on a bedrock of meaningful labor. In sum, Marx’s utopia, encapsulates human freedom as a precondition for creativity and cooperation in a society where economic antagonisms have ceased to exist.

The “Warm Stream” of Marxist Thought

In the 20th century, German utopian philosopher, Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), re-theorized Marxism to add a spiritual, forward-looking dimension in the form of utopia. Bloch contended that Marxism ought to go beyond the mere analysis of capitalism — dubbed “cold stream” — and speak of a better world: the “warm stream.” Bloch’s three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1986), frames utopia as an integral part of autonomous and creative human being-in-the-world. To be human means to construct utopias against the status quo.

As the book’s title suggests, the subjective disposition of hope is essential for Blochian utopia. Hope transcends the drudgery of our everyday lives. Liberating us from resignation to the status quo, hope requires people to throw themselves actively into what is becoming. Human beings exist in history but can also make their own history. Fusing hope and critique, utopia functions as a catalyst for human aspirations in the name of a liberated humanity.

Instead of giving rise to utopias, hope may of course take the form of “building castles in the sky.” But even in these self-deceptive acts, for Bloch it is the longing for a better world that shines through. In a highly idiosyncratic style making ample use of biblical language and drawing on in-depth knowledge of the German Idealist philosophy, he writes: “in all these utopias, these voyages to Cytherea, there came to expression the expectant tendency that permeates all human history.”

For Bloch the work of Marx constitutes a milestone in the utopian aspirations of humanity. Marxist socialism provides a theory with which utopia can be turned into a reality — achieved practically and collectively for the first time. Furthermore, a Marxist utopia is grounded in economic and political theory. Societal struggles coalesce around the project of post-capitalism. In other words, Bloch develops the program of Marxism in the form of human freedom and a classless, socialist society. As Bloch himself writes:

This road is and remains that of socialism, it is the practice of concrete utopia. Everything that is non-illusory, real-possible about the hope image leads to Marx, works — as always, in different ways, rationed according to the situation — as part of socialist changing of the world. The architecture of hope thus really becomes one on to man, who had previously only seen as a dream and as high, all too high pre-appearance, and one on to the new earth.

Bloch only disagrees with Marx and Engels concerning the nature of utopianism. In his estimation, they were correct to criticize abstract utopianism as mere wishful thinking, but they also made a mistake in equating all utopianism with abstract utopianism.

Bloch is adamant that concrete utopianism is part and parcel of emancipatory consciousness, which complements Marx’s theory of economic contradictions. A concrete utopia is the “what for?” of the inherent vision of social struggles. Bloch’s philosophy continues to be relevant as it illuminates the potential of a world yet to be realized.

Ecosocialism

Ecosocialism developed mostly starting from the 1970s as an attempt to reconcile human society with nature, thereby healing the wounds inflicted by capitalism. Influential exponents of ecosocialism include Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro and Andre Gorz. According to ecosocialism, nature has inherent value and human society coexists with the natural world, rather than outside it.

Much like earlier utopias, ecosocialism contains a spiritual dimension. The non-material interaction of humans with nature is seen as an integral part of human being-in-the-world. Ecosocialism does not posit that humans are a “surplus” on this planet or guilty of hubris, greed, aggression or other savageries. There is no unchangeable genetic inheritance or inherent corruption like original sin.

While it would be an exaggeration to state that ecosocialism is unequivocally utopian, some of its most influential representatives have taken a positive stance towards utopia. For example, ecosocialist thinker Michael Löwy is in agreement with the understanding of utopia as a catalyst for social change:

Utopia is indispensable to social change, provided that it is based on contradictions found in reality and on real social movements. This is true of ecosocialism, which proposes a strategic alliance between “reds” and “greens” — not in the narrow sense used by politicians applied to social democratic and green parties, but in the broader sense between the labor movement and the ecological movement — and the movement of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited of the South.

For such a red-green an alliance, forging a new equilibrium between the Global North and South is a significant challenge. The injustice suffered by the Global South is a direct result of neocolonial resource extraction and exploitative relations of production. Due to the impact of climate change on the Global South and the disintegration of the working class in the North, the solidarity between workers across the North and South is increasingly important.

What is necessary is a reparative agenda that places the responsibility on historic emitters in the Global North, who have to contribute their fair share to planetary sustainability. This includes measures such as striving for zero carbon by 2030, scaling up climate financing, opening borders, rethinking land access and providing clean technology to countries that need it. Only then is global change possible.

Socialism in the Depth of the Pandemic

COVID-19 has caused great damage to human social life across the globe, giving concrete and tangible meaning to Ernst Bloch´s otherwise speculative notion of “darkness of the lived moment” (Dunkel des Gelebten Augenblicks) in the form of anguish and isolation. With social distancing and quarantine, what is palpably missing is a “we,” even the limited human contact of everyday sociability under capitalism.

Consequently, “the social question” — concerning the organization of social life — has emerged anew. If returning to pre-COVID-19 normalcy is the sole aim, then much of the world likely faces a decade of malaise due to austerity-driven recovery, the specter of nationalism, and — for those without wealth and privilege — diminished life opportunities. Instead of temporary crisis measures, what is needed is post-capitalist ecosocialism. But what would that look like?

Firstly, hostility towards socialism as a radical alternative needs to be sufficiently addressed and overcome. Challenging as that task is, in recent years, younger generations in countries like Spain, France, England and the USA have been warming to the idea of socialism. For many disillusioned with capitalism, Podemos in Spain, the socialism of Jean-Luc Melenchon, the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders’s passionate plea for democratic socialism in the US have undoubtedly touched a nerve. Thanks to these valiant efforts, “capitalist realism” is no longer insurmountable.

Secondly, 21st-century socialism needs to hold fast to another idea that characterized 19th-century socialists: work should not be done at the cost of one’s health or well-being. COVID-19 may not discriminate, but we do. Hence, the virus has had a disproportionate impact on the less privileged. Frontline workers of the care economy such as medical workers, food workers and social service workers whose contributions were celebrated through last year’s state of emergency, were at the same time some of the most endangered people in society.

And although capitalism is increasingly digitalized, it continues to deny workers dignity and self-realization. The flexibility demanded of workers by the so-called “gig” economy has transferred risks and insecurity onto those workers and their families. The lack of control over one’s employment also leads to alienation.

This alienation is arguably best captured in Amazon, one of the biggest winners in the pandemic who employ workers in low-paid and precarious positions across the globe. Amazon utilizes “digital Taylorism,” which entails the small-scale and standardized division of labor, digital surveillance of labor, and direct control of employees in their work. Digital Taylorism gives rise to atomization and excessive performative pressure, widespread dissatisfaction and, where possible, dissent. Utopia needs to be about a different kind of work.

Thirdly, the socialism of the 21st century has to be ecological. Because society and environment are dialectical, social emancipation necessarily entails a non-exploitative relation to the planet. The following are a set of key ecosocialist demands:

• Rejection of the debt system and neoliberal “structural adjustment.” Imposed on Global South countries by the International Monetary Fund     and the World Bank, this system has dramatic social and ecological consequences including massive unemployment, dismantling of social protections, and destruction of natural resources. Rejecting this system thus entails massive global increase in welfare activities to secure food, water, health, education and suitable physical and social infrastructure, especially in developing countries.
• Global deployment of renewable energy technologies, public transportation systems, carbon neutral production systems and alternative products as fast as possible by redirecting global surpluses and by openly sharing knowledge and technology. This may reduce the speed and severity of onset of future climate change.
• Curbing global production of mining-based materials and energy like iron and steel, cement, thermal coal, oil and aluminum, both for reasons of climate change and to prevent further destruction of land. Reviving life in the oceans by curbing the use of oceans and seas for material dumping (be it solid or liquid or radioactive) by any entity whether state or private, including armed forces.
• Public regulation and democratic planning in investment and technological change as well as the application of social, political and ecological criteria to the price and production of goods. No public financing of technology for private profit.

Taken together, these demands constitute a real and concrete utopia — a radical but possible transformation. The impact of such a transformation would be — analogously to 19th century utopian socialist aspirations — a re-integration of the economy into the ecological and the social world. The seeming contradiction between the ideal and the attainable is the generative tension inherent to concrete utopias. Such a utopia is only limited only by the natural world itself.

Eager to grasp the historical moment, socialists have been attentive to the crises of capitalism, socialism’s perennial nemesis. With a looming ecological and social crisis, the moment, at least in theory, is propitious for socialism. But what are the current prospects of humanistic and democratic socialism?

Susan Watkins´s words about dissent and social struggles across the globe at the dawn of the new decade in New Left Review are instructive here:

Alongside France, the US has become a world leader in social tumult. In early March [2020], it was widely believed that lockdown would put an end to protest. Instead, the ferment has intensified. […] The question in prospect is not so much the disappearance of populism, but rather what new political forms these often inchoate protests may take in the 2020s.

Inchoate as the protests may often be, their demand for popular social and economic justice is a common thread. This thread is at odds with the capitalist status quo and its regime of heavy-handed policing and labor commodification. If not stopped in their tracks or reconciled with capital, these demands — and the struggles which accompany them — will give human social life a new and more just, ecological and socialist direction.

Ecosocialism is thus increasingly a necessary way forward amidst and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an attainable utopia which represents a hospitable world beyond the world of capitalism we have known so far.

Martin Aidnik is an Estonian sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at Nottingham University, UK. His scholarly interests include social theory and European studies.

The Climate Crisis – What do I tell my Grandchildren?

 

Written by Allan Todd 

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

Euripides

For several decades - through the years of Cold War, the start of neoliberalism, the collapse of the degenerated and deformed workers’ states of the Eastern bloc into rampant capitalism, and the growing signs of environmental and ecological degredation - I’ve always tried to follow Antonio Gramsci’s maxim: “Pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.”  

Farewell Gramsci 

But, right now, I have to confess: that increasingly-fragile ‘optimism of the will’ has just about gone. What has prompted this collapse in optimism is news about recent developments in the Green Party’s Climate Campaign Committee. 

In 2017, whilst still a member of the Green Party, I was co-opted onto the Green Party’s national Climate Campaign Committee. The aim of those of us on it was to prepare the launch of a national Green Party campaign on the Climate Crisis. However, after several months of growing awareness that the leadership were not that keen on a radical national campaign on the climate, I gradually stepped back, and instead put all my efforts into continuing the organisation of the anti-fracking Green Mondays at Preston New Road in Lancashire. 

In the meantime, whilst the Green Party remained largely inactive on the Climate, Extinction Rebellion came along the following year - and really brought the Climate Crisis to the media’s attention, thus pushing it up the political agenda. Something the Green Party could have done, almost a year earlier. 

Nonetheless, as one always to have doubts about whether I’m doing the right thing, I occasionally wondered if I should have remained active on that Climate Campaign Committee. But, just recently, I learnt that one of the main co-leaders of that Committee has decided to step down, because of…growing frustration at the way in which radical suggestions for climate campaigns were regularly blocked or watered down by the leadership and the executive. 

This, of course, chimes with recent posts on London Green Left’s Blog about developments within the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW). In particular, the news reminded me of a post by Dee Searle in July, in which she commented on how the leadership had prioritised: 

“…electoral success over radical environmental campaigning… At an internal review of the 2019 snap General Election manifesto, it was revealed that genuinely radical climate mitigation policies developed by the party’s Climate Change Policy Working Group had been removed by a small group around the leadership team and Caroline Lucas’s office because they weren’t vote winners. Yet the election was being held against a background of almost daily revelations about the gathering pace of climate-related environmental calamity. A squandered opportunity to step up campaigning pressure if ever there was one.”  

However, what for me has pushed sadness into despair are the group discussions amongst members of the Climate Campaign Committee that have taken place around the decision by that leading Committee member to step down. 

Trimming to the right 

The most depressing contribution was one that seemed to suggest that, given that most voters are currently voting Tory, any radical left-sounding parties or policies have “no chance of influencing or getting momentum” from voters. To argue that nothing radical can be elected now - or can manage to push changes through by pressure from social movements from below - is defeatist. But even to hint that we should tail-end any Tory/rightwing political trend in order to be more 'successful’ with voters is far worse than defeatist - it is downright dangerous. 

Given that Boris Johnson successfully pushed for Brexit, does that mean parties such as the Greens should have abandoned Remain and backed Brexit instead, in order to get ‘momentum'? And, given the current level of xenophobia and out-right racism over refugees, which seems to resonate with so many Tory voters, should the Greens now join the calls for ‘taking back control of our borders’? There was even a dismissive suggestion that issues such as feminism (and presumably racism?) were “big turnoffs” as regards voters.  Words failed me.

This idea of ‘trimming’ to fit in more with a temporary Tory majority reminds me of why I left the Green Party. It wasn’t just over the ‘Unite to Remain’ pact with the LibDems - a party so clearly on the other side of the barricades - but much more to do with the growing rightward drift within the Green Party: which is, it seems, precisely why Climate policies have been watered down or vetoed. 

Arguments that radical policies for social and economic justice should be ditched were very much to the fore on the GPEW Members’ on-line discussion site before and after GE2017 - often, from the right, put forward in a personally-abusive way. In case it has been forgotten, the early origins of what eventually became the Green Party - first the People’s Party & then the Ecology Party - were from the centre-right, and it seems that things are returning to that position. 

And, in case this too has been forgotten, that right-of-centre approach did NOT result in a massive growth in membership or in elected representatives. That all came AFTER the Green Party - recognising, with the help of members of Green Left, that environmental destruction and the Climate Crisis AND growing social and economic inequalities were BOTH the results of the same ‘System’ - had made a conscious decision to move to a more leftwing position. 

That drift to the right within the Green Party has led to the stance amongst many members that ‘Labour has to be hurt to make it see sense’ over the issues of making election pacts and supporting Proportional Representation (PR), by standing Greens in every seat - including in those key marginals Labour needed to hold or win in order to defeat the Tories. 

Though, of course, the only people who are really hurt by a Labour loss/Tory win are those who’ve already been ‘hurting’ since at least 2010: those forced into food banks and/or onto the streets, the growing number of children living in poverty, and those whose life-expectancy has either stalled or even declined. Prof King of Cambridge University, one of those involved in a recent study that concluded there had been at least 120,000 austerity-related deaths, referred to this as “economic murder”.  

This rightwards drift was particularly typified most recently by last year's ‘Unite to Remain’ pact with the LibDems. Just because Labour - wrong-headedly - remains against electoral pacts and PR is no reason to go holding hands in a pact with a party like the LibDems which is still led by unrepentant neoliberals. Amongst other things, that ‘Unite to Remain’ pact - essentially pushed by the leadership - was so unprincipled. 

It was made with a party that had (a) blocked an opposition attempt to get a Vote of No Confidence in Johnson and to have a People’s Vote with ‘Remain’ as an option; (b) abstained on an Opposition amendment to stop further privatisation of NHS services; (c) been the first opposition party to give Johnson and Cummings the pre-Brexit election they’d always wanted; (d) totally abandoned the idea of a People’s Vote; and (e) a leader who even said she’d press the nuclear button. 

That’s where ‘accommodating right-of-centre views’ takes you. What was particularly criminal about this ‘Unite to Remain’ pact was that 10 of its 60 seats actually targeted sitting PRO-REMAIN Labour MPs in key marginals - such as Stroud and Warrington South, both of which saw Tories replace those Labour MPs. 

Radicalism isn’t finished 

In fact, claims that radical politics now have no appeal, so the Greens should go more centre-right, do not stand up to any serious examination. In case it’s been forgotten, in GE2017, Corbyn-led Labour got 12.9m votes and 40% of the votes - almost beating May’s Tories, who got 13.6m votes. And that was after 2 years of open sabotage from rightwing Labour MPs and, as we now know from the leaked Labour internal report, of secret sabotage from rightwing Labour officials as well; never mind the hostile mainstream media reporting.   

To put that GE2017 vote into some historical context, Corbyn’s vote then was BIGGER than that achieved by (a) the more ‘centrist’ Miliband in GE2015 (9.3m and 30% of the vote); (b) the even more ‘centrist’ Brown in GE2010 (8.6m and 29%); & (c) the much more ‘centrist’ Blair in GE2005 (9.5m and 35%) AND in GE2001 (10.7m and 40%). And, as we all know, GE2019 was not a normal general election but basically a one-issue election over Brexit.  

What is most saddening is the existence of what could be called the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ syndrome, as the right of the Greens rule out any co-operation with any radical party or group, in order, instead, to appeal to ‘soft’ Tories. Though, to be fair, this PFJ syndrome is one that is also still very prevalent on our centre-left side of the barricades - whether it’s Labour, or many of the smaller groups to the left of them. The idea that any one group or party has all the answers was always wrong-headed - but, in the midst of an ever-worsening Climate Crisis, it is nothing short of criminal lunacy. 

It reminds me of what the comedian Mark Steel said at the launch of the People’s Assembly in 2013: 

“I don’t know what it is with the left. They say: ‘You know, I agree with 99.9% of what you say - but that f-ing 0.1%? I’m having absolutely nothing to do with you!’"

The main thing right now is for all those who see the Climate Emergency as the number one priority to stop slagging off every other group and, instead, to join hands in a broad Red-Green United Front. 

Yet what we currently have are at least three different schemes to set up new parties to the left of the current Starmer-led Labour Party, and now the suggestion from mostly centre-right Greens to set up a separate Climate Party. This at a time when it looks almost certain that 2020 will be the hottest year since recordings began in the 19thC - with the 5 hottest years ever being since 2015:

Quite frankly, as the risks of catastrophic Climate Breakdown increase, we don’t have time to waste building yet more parties or groups from scratch - instead, we need to be using the next few years building bridges to get a broad movement for immediate climate action. 

So what do I tell my grandchildren?

I have just had my first ‘social bubble’ - with my grandchildren, who I hadn’t seen since 11 March, because of lockdown. They have already experienced at first-hand, 5 years ago, the devastation of Climate Crisis flooding.  

So what do I say to them as their world really starts to burn and drown in worsening ‘Hothouse Earth’ conditions? How can I even begin to explain to them how so many people, parties and groups that claim to ‘get’ the Climate Crisis, and who should have known better, insisted instead on ‘doing their own thing’ and stayed sitting in their separate camps, preferring to ‘hang separately rather than stand together’? 

Other than saying it really was ‘The Age of Stupid’, I haven’t the faintest idea - beyond “I’m so sorry”.

Allan Todd is an ecosocialist/environmental and anti-fascist activist, and author of Revolutions 1789-1917

Inoculating Against Globalization: Coronavirus and the Search for Alternatives

Written by Sam Gindin and first published at Socialist Project

Social developments constantly surprise. The latest anxieties over the economic contradictions of extreme globalization haven’t been triggered by a trade war, inter-imperial rivalry, a financial meltdown or riots in the streets. They’ve rather been sparked by an apparently non-economic and contingent event: the coronavirus outbreak. 

As precautionary measures send workers home in a place few of us have ever heard of and the ramifications shut workplaces in places most of us never knew were connected, a business panic has set in. Grown men (and women) stare in horror at stock market screens and the business press fretfully anticipates an imminent recession.

Yet a deeper fear lurks in business circles. Has globalization plateaued? Might the further spread of the virus “put globalization into reverse?” Some main-stream journalists have even suggested that a slowdown in hyper-globalization “may not be a bad thing, given the sometimes absurd and dangerous dimensions it took on.” Others are more cataclysmic, asking, as one headline does, whether the spread of the coronavirus could “Hasten the Great Coming Apart of Globalization.”

Preparing for ‘More of Them’

The least convincing response to the present nervousness is one that reduces the coronavirus to an unfortunate one-shot event. The EcoHealth Alliance, which tracks infectious disease events over time and globally, has found that such events “surged in the 1980s with the advent of the HIV virus and has remained elevated ever since.” This has led The Wall Street Journal to soberly warn that “[T]he public needs to prepare for more of them.” But what, especially in the context of globalization, can ‘preparation’ in fact mean?

The pressures that come with globalization have made a virtue out of restraining, if not reducing, health budgets (with the US standing out in handing out $1.5-trillion in tax cuts favoring the super-rich while still debating whether universal healthcare for all is ‘affordable’). At the same time, the profitability advantages of economies of scale and specialization, made all the more demanding by intensified international competition, have led to extended value chains – production structures, including that of medicine, that involve multiple inputs from multiple plants in multiple countries.

Add the near-universal business identification of any excess capacity with unnecessary waste (‘lean production’) thereby underplaying the significance of a degree of flexibility, and you have local medical systems left vulnerable to even minor interruptions and lacking the capacity to confront unexpected emergencies. To globalization as an economic curse is added the medical curse of undermining the domestic ability to prepare for, and respond to, potential pandemics.

These concerns are magnified when we turn attention to the most threatening and largest scale pandemic on the horizon: the environment. The ecological threat is not a distant unknown but a scientifically established presence in the here and now. The challenge it poses is not what to do after we’ve passed the ecological tipping point, nor only how to slow down the assault on the environment. It is, as Barbara-Harriss White has emphasized, the need to reconstitute what we have already damaged. This means transforming everything about how we live, work, travel, consume, and relate.

Near-consensus on the sacrifices demanded in such a focus on the environment would be difficult in the best of circumstances but near impossible if the existing degree of inequalities persist. The economic restructuring involved in ‘fixing’ the environment and the concerted actions across all sectors of society this would entail necessitates a capacity to plan. 

It is inconceivable that such a social transformation can be accomplished within an economic system based on fragmented private corporations maximizing their individual profits in the face of competition as well as compensating fragmented individuals for their lack of control over their lives with more individual consumption.

Truly addressing the environment would involve a sweeping turn to national planning, international coordination and popular support. The degree of democratization this implies re how we address our material needs would, in the most fundamental ways, challenge not only ‘hyper-globalization’ but the social relations and edifice that constitute capitalism.

Are We on the Verge of Deglobalization?

If what we mean by ‘deglobalization’ is its plateauing or even slight reversal, this may be welcome but – as with third way social democracy’s promise of ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ – we should not expect all that much from an allegedly ‘gentler globalization’. It is one thing to accept compromises in the long struggle for fundamental change but quite another to sell the promise, as Josh Biven sarcastically puts it in a book title, that with any kind of capitalist globalization Everybody Wins Except Most of Us.

Might globalization itself then collapse or rot from its abundance of contradictions? Maybe. But don’t count on it happening without a determining push from social actors. Political graveyards are full of premature predictions of the ‘inevitable’ and imminent end to this or that; better to avoid adding to that list. 

Global capitalism didn’t just happen but was made and its end will most likely only come out of an appreciation that its multitude of economic, social and political contradictions and horrors aren’t signs of some automatic end to globalization, but rather openings that can contribute to its conscious unmaking.

The discontent with globalization has been there for some time but it has recently come to the fore within both the right and left. It has however been the right which has had the greater general success in mobilizing the brewing popular frustrations. The right’s response has primarily been performative, distinguished by its nativist rather than class orientation – full of sound and fury with ugly attacks on immigration while, occasional rhetoric aside, having little concern to substantially confront the corporate power at the core of globalization.

Trump has, for example, raged against NAFTA and Mexico’s impact on the US auto industry, yet the new NAFTA (USMCA) had little or no impact on the behavior of the US auto majors and the return of American jobs. Within six weeks of signing the agreement GM could, with impunity, announce the closure of four major US plants (and one in Canada). 

Similarly, for all of Trump’s railings against China as the primary culprit in the decline of American manufacturing, his end game has been an often confused mix of geopolitical concerns (slowing down Chinese technological-military advance) and getting China to ease the conditions for the entry into China of US financial and high-tech companies (i.e. a deepening, rather than undermining, of the global economic order). 

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs in the US Midwest have quietly disappeared from attention. The bluster about reducing the ‘unfair’ burden that the US bears in overseeing global capitalism and the mobilizing of populist sympathies as leverage in this cause has generally aided sections of American business rather than the American working-class.

The contradiction for the right lies in the fact that to deliver to its working-class base, it would have to lead a crusade against the freedoms of corporate America to invest, trade, and reallocate profits as they please. But with even mid-size businesses now firmly integrated into the global economy, right-wing politicians are not about to alienate that base. 

They may deal with this by looking to keep their base intact through upping the attacks on immigration and thundering against ‘elites’, and/or rightwing politicians may take a more authoritarian turn. But we cannot ignore the possibility that the right’s contradictory rhetoric, (which affects the legitimacy of globalization), and populist erosions of state capacities (which affect the American administration and supervision of the global order) may, inadvertently, also end up damaging, if not undermining, the advance of globalization.

What then of the left vying for government? The dilemma for the left begins with the reality that the economic, political and media establishment is less tolerant of anti-globalization rhetoric from the left. 

But in any case, trying to govern while working to disentangle the economy from the dense web of cross border linkages now so powerfully in place is an intimidatingly daunting task. And since, as this process challenges capital and private investment, it can be assumed corporations will threaten to leave or refuse to invest because of the uncertainty, significant hardships will, for a time, necessarily fall on workers. 

And so, unless the understandings and necessary commitments have already been built among workers – unless workers see the coming difficulties as investments in their future in contra-distinction to the never-ending concessions they faced before – the constraints on how far any left government could go are severe.

Why Haven’t Workers Exploited the Vulnerability of Value Chains?

The role of the coronavirus in exposing the economic fragility of global production raises the perplexing of why, if the interruption of one link in the chain can have such a devastating overall impact, workers and unions haven’t used this leverage to counter the attacks they’ve suffered? (A recent example of the resistance value of interrupting the economy at its critical nodes, albeit at a different scale, has recently been witnessed in the protests of Indigenous protestors and their allies in shutting down railroads and occasionally highways in Canada.)

The explanation for the current relative passivity of workers is that though corporations had experimented with outsourcing and value changes earlier, they were hesitant to go all in until two conditions were met. First, that the outsourcing of work would not lead to a disruptive war with workers in the home workplace. 

Second that corporations were confident that the workers receiving the work would not use it as a lever to hold the corporations ‘ransom’. That is, a key precondition for generalizing value chains was a defeated working-class: one that was demoralized, had lowered its expectations, and was largely leaderless.

The importance of leadership lies in the limits of repeated rounds of militancy in any particular workplace that disrupt overall production. The corporate response would be to close such facilities and find other sources. 

But if the interruptions were strategically coordinated and spread across numerous plants rather than isolated to particular ones, corporations could not close all the plants without a) risking a political backlash that blocked it from domestic markets, inspiring hard limits on global corporations; and b) undertaking the substantial costs of moving elsewhere only to likely find other workers soon responding similarly.

The post-70s weakness of labour has commonly been understood as the result of globalization. But that has it backwards. The acceleration of globalization from that period on was only possible because, in spite of economic militancy, labour’s class and political weakness couldn’t block the acceleration of globalization. 

(Once globalization was on stream, it did indeed weaken workers further.) The point is that as important as militancy is, it is only a beginning. If the movement isn’t also politicized – expanded across the class and extended to challenge for state power – the militancy will be exhausted, and the movement ultimately crippled or destroyed.

There is no way out of this box without a transformation of unions themselves. The catch is that while workers have at some moments and in some places demonstrated the potentials of organized working people, it’s hard to imagine a widespread and sustained worker revolt without an institution – a socialist party of some kind – that sees creating and developing a coherent working-class out of its disparate pieces as its singular pre-occupation.

Reorienting to Inward Development

What interests us here is not how to turn the delegitimation of hyper-globalization into a vague ‘easing’ of globalization. Rather it is how, as socialists, we can better position ourselves for transforming society. This necessitates radically reorienting the political agenda away from global competition to “inward development.” We are not, it’s important to emphasize, suggesting a localist retreat from technology, modern life, and connections beyond our borders. 

Nor does this direction have anything to do with a (Steve) Bannon-esque populist nationalism that places ‘us’ before the rest of humanity. And though we emphasize a nationally focussed alternative, we insist that it retain an internationalist sensibility.

The argument for a turn inward begins with the reality that all organizing is ultimately local or domestic. Second, all politics must necessarily go through the state, especially if we want to seriously constrain the power of mobile capital. Third, the building of an alternative that maximizes the democratic administration of all aspects of our lives – which includes attention to the human scale of maximizing participation – is conditional on transforming the nation state as part of in turn transforming sub-levels of the state and local workplace and community institutions.

We conclude with two examples – representing the most international of issues, the environment and immigration – that speak to the mediation of a national focus with an internationalist sensibility. 

Even though ‘environmentalism in one country’ is a contradiction in terms, it is the case that it is primarily within each country that the work of changing attitudes, values and priorities can be carried out and the conversion of eco-structures and productive capacities to take on environmental repair and sustainability can be addressed. It is on that basis that meaningful international agreements can be signed, technologies and other supports be made freely available to poorer countries and genuine international cooperation achieved.

In the case of immigration, we would not want to exaggerate the claim that the shift to inward development within the developed countries will in itself solve the immigration crises (all of whom have a capacity to take in much higher levels of migrants than they do now). 

But that shift could nevertheless bring positive internationalist implications. To the extent that the immigrant crisis is reframed in terms of why people feel compelled to leave their countries, the shift to inward development among the developed countries might legitimate support for states in the poorer countries also moving toward a degree of inward development. 

And with the pressures of competitive globalization eased and workers in the developed countries feeling more secure, the argument that the advance of poorer countries comes only at our expense would carry less weight. It might consequently be easier to imagine transferring otherwise competitive technologies to poorer countries along with solidaristic corps of young educators and trainers.

Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition is forthcoming with Haymarket in 2020.

Climate refugees could reach 300 million, a population without rights

Written by Daniela Passeri and first published at il manifesto

Between 200 million and 300 million people could be forced to migrate due to the effects of climate change by the end of the century, as long as we’re not able to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius as set out by the Paris Agreement.

That forecast appears on the last page of the 2019 Report on the Green Economy, presented on Wednesday in Rimini, Italy on the occasion of the Ecomondo fair. Although it is difficult to make accurate and precise predictions, these numbers provide us with an order of magnitude to judge the gravity of the phenomenon.

Furthermore, the World Bank, in a report published last year entitled “Preparing for Internal Climate Migration,” estimated that 143 million people could be forced to move within their countries to escape the longterm impacts of climate change. The phenomenon will mainly affect the poorest countries, but even Italy will not be immune.

The report presented on Wednesday includes a forecast of what could happen in our country in the absence of mitigation and adaptation measures. By 2050, the number of people exposed to the risk of flooding due to rising sea levels could range from 72,000 to 90,000 (compared to 12,000 today), while by the end of the century the number could rise to between 198,000-265,000.

Globally, the largest migration movements are set to take place in around 50 countries, whose total population is expected to double by 2050. These are countries that have fewer resources to manage the risks, and whose survival depends precisely on those ecosystem services (forests, coasts, lakes and rivers) that are most under threat.

Over the past two decades, most of the migrations due to climate change have occurred in non-OECD countries — that is, those in the developing world — and 97% of the people displaced due to sudden extreme climate events between 2008 and 2013 were in countries with medium-low incomes.

If we comb through the national reports that the participant states are providing to the secretariat of the Paris Agreement, we find that 44 out of 162 countries (mainly from Africa, Asia Pacific and Oceania) make specific reference to the phenomenon of migration due to the climate, whether internal or not.

The scientists of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) also warn about this. In the report presented last summer dedicated to the soil and the risks of the degradation of ecosystems, it is emphasized that these phenomena will only amplify environmental migration, particularly in places where extreme climate events will jeopardize food safety and the very possibility of living in environments upset by rising temperatures or the desertification of soils.

Despite the great number of studies on this subject, the environmental causes of migration are not currently recognized by international law: environmental refugees have no recognized status and are therefore not entitled to any kind of protection. There is no convention on environmental refugees (and who knows how long it would take to establish one), nor can the victims of climate change be included in the category of ‘refugees’ as defined by the 1951 Geneva Convention.

Only the UN’s Global Compact for Migration, established in 2018—and which Italy’s Conte government has refused to sign—introduced among its objectives that of “develop[ing] adaptation and resilience strategies to sudden-onset and slow-onset natural disasters,” which may include drought, the consequences of deforestation, fires, famine and pollution. Even this is little more than a statement of intent.

According to Filippo Miraglia, the head of migration issues for ARCI, the issue has had the attention of the United Nations for years, but no solution has been found so far. “I think the UN Assembly could step in by adding to the attributions of the UN High Commission for Refugees that of intervening on behalf of climate migrants,“ Miraglia tells us.

“Of course, we must first define what a climate emergency is and conduct in-depth studies on what areas of the world and what local groups are more susceptible to the risks arising from climate change. The same scientists who are studying the climate are well aware of the most vulnerable areas. With the help of mapping and projections, the UNHCR would have all the means and experience needed to be able to intervene, especially in developing countries.”

Eco-Fascisms and Eco-Socialisms

Written by Max Ajl and first published at Verso Blog

Garrett Hardin, the biologist who aged into alignment with white nationalist politics, had the dubious honor of having confected one of the most addlepated and incorrect theories in the natural sciences. Hardin argued that amidst human tendency to overbreed, societies would run rampant over common resources amidst a Hobbesian-style resource grab: this is the “tragedy of the commons.”

His solution to this conundrum: individual property rights.

Yet, Hardin was dead wrong. From the rainbow-hued historical skeins of Peter Linebaugh to the heterodox institutional economics of Elinor Ostrom to the historical ethno-botany of Kat Anderson, we know scientifically and historiographically something long known by populations that for eons had managed their commonwealths, including the indigenous peoples of these lands: the problem is not collective mismanagement of resources. They can handle that just fine. The problem is claiming otherwise to justify theft.

Hardin drew on a strain of “overpopulation” theory which harkened back to the arch-ideologue of hatred of the destitute, Thomas Malthus. What Malthus wrote had no connection to reality. It was a simple attack on the poor, blaming them in this way and that for their own poverty.

Marx aimed considerable artillery at Malthus, seeing in his work a distilled contempt for the needy. A later Marx turned his attention to town-country rifts manifest in lack of nutrient recycling. He saw imperialism magnifying and stretching those rifts, displacing capitalism’s ecological consequences to the world’s weak and poor – notably in Ireland and, as he would come to see, the Americas.

Political ecology, born in the 1980s, carried this insight further. Physical ecologies, if sufficiently damaged by capitalism, could have diminished capacities to support good lives for those who lived on them. And damage to the ecology worked through class. Ecologically unequal exchange reminds us that class also has a national aspect: the core-periphery divide. Some national ecologies get more damaged than others.

The Fascist Political Ecology of Climate

With IPCC reports landing like forecasts for Armageddon on rare-earth powered laptops world-wide, there is now widespread generational and civilizational concern over anthropogenic climate change. Ecological arguments are back on the agenda.

But ecology is not politics. Politics, as political ecology taught us, appears in diagnoses and prescriptions for solutions.

From nativist conservationist grassroots eco-fascism; modernizing authoritarian eco-fascism; eco-socialisms based on environmentally unequal exchange and livelihoods and social reproduction; eco-socialisms putting center-stage smallholders and forest dwellers; modernization-curious eco-socialisms; and eco-modernist manifestoes targeting moonshots, asteroid mining, factories in the stars, and cascades of techno-fixes for the industrial capitalist socio-ecological catastrophe, there is many a solution to the climate crisis and the ecological crisis in which it is nested.

Each proposed solution maps social power and powerless. Each offers a way to assess culpability and innocence. And each, in zeroing in on social subjects for a just – or unjust – transition, implies a politics.

Let’s start with the bad politics. In just the most recent of a long list of manifestoes written by eco-fascist mass murderers, the El Paso shooter’s manifesto welded together Great Replacement Theory with concern over limited resources, aggressive settler-nativism with concern with the environment. It represents one “solution to environmental crisis: localist-curious eco-fascism based on ethnic cleansing. This idea is not new, as the scribblings of Hardin attest. Like a wraith, Malthus is back.

Such grassroots eco-fascism has to be confronted. But it is far from likely to be the form in which eco-fascism will come to the United States as an institutional phenomenon.

It is good to remember here what fascism is and is not, how it is like and unlike the day-to-day crimes of non-fascist capitalism. As Aime Césaire reminded us, it was run-of-the-mill European civilization, its “respectable bourgeois,” which extirpated 90,000 in Madagascar, three million in Indochina, and colonized the US, pillaging and killing across the continent.

Fascism is an extension and intensification of liberal capitalism. As Césaire reminded us, and as Modi’s moves against Kashmir should further remind us, fascism has historically had a colonial or expansionist edge.  

My bet is on eco-fascism coming in the shape of a new socio-technical machine, a kind of Fortress Eco-Nationalism: a zero-carbon-dioxide emitting way of life in which either the wealthy or the entire population of the wealthy states will laager up behind militarized seawalls and sea-lanes.

This is the hellscape that the El Paso shooter imagines as a dreamscape: resources hoarded for residents of the US – their numbers diminished via the violent expulsion of Latin Americans. Perhaps bio-fuels swapped in for petroleum, lithium batteries swapped in for internal combustion engines, all occurring at a pace too slow and with too much carbon dioxide spent on the transition to avert the transformation of much of the formerly colonized world into barely-habitable sacrifice zones. 

And as forests and fields become dead-zones, people will flee, and as the trophic sphere shudders amid Silent Spring-levels of bird, bee, and insect die-off, even more will flee. And they will flee to the wealthy North.

Populations may also flee because the physical resources for industrial renewal will rest on ripping up chunks of the rest of the world through open-pit and strip-mines alongside slurry ponds brimming with toxins. 

They will also flee as drought spreads across countries already hammered by Western sanctions, like today’s Zimbabwe, or metropolises desiccated by unplanned sprawl like Chennai, or the 25 percent of the world suffering water stress. Fortress Eco-Nationalism is already in play. Some nations suffer political-ecological distress and some can buffer it.

The foretastes of such a future are right in front of us. Look at our southern border. Huge numbers of the displaced are from Honduras, suffering under historic drought, where a right-wing US coup d’état murdered environmental activist Berta Caceres.

Right-wing think-tanks have noticed this “threat.” They converge on a militarized approach to socio-economic transformation, an obsessive interest in maintaining industrial capitalism, disdain for sustainable and restorative agriculture, and worry over immigration flows they consider unmanageable.

It goes without saying that the right-wing Fortress Eco-Nationalists have no interest in theories like that of environmentally unequal exchange (EUE). EUE teaches us that prices, capitalism, and current technological packages are not easily untangled. 

Prices are the politically enforced symbolic system through which environmental toxicity, hand-in-hand with current technologies, concentrates in the periphery whereas the “benefits” concentrate in the core. Because accumulation occurs on a global scale, populations in the core vastly out-consume populations in the periphery.

Yet, bastardized notion of EUE, even if inchoately perceived, animates the El Paso manifesto. The author is entirely aware that the US “way of life” relies on large quantities of resources, a pattern which cannot be shared globally.

The ecological crisis will not stop at human-made borders. The consequences of biodiversity loss and extinctions and the rising seas will care little for the concrete walls and automated drones which may stop the human tide and even stem rising waters – at least until they don’t. The multiplication of avian and porcine flus, multi-drug-resistant bacteria, and fatal super-funguses heed human-made border posts even less, and the idea of quarantines to keep out viruses and fungi is a chimera.

Eco-Socialism as a People’s Green New Deal

And what of eco-socialism? Recent months have seen the idea of the Green New Deal become widespread. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laudably jumpstarted discussion of a political response to climate changes amongst sectors that had previously not been discussing it. 

But reducing eco-socialism to the GND, or more to the point, her GND, letting it blobbily envelop all conversation in the core, comes with costs. Once everything has been absorbed in the gelatinous mass, we will lose important distinctions between different brands of eco-socialism.

For example, eco-socialism mixed with notions of climate apartheid are good slogans, but they do not tell us about what needs to change and how, nor do they seem to effectively remind people that some of the countries suffering under climate-linked drought are also suffering under politically-driven sanctions – imperialism.

Pasting the label eco-socialism onto plans for state-business partnerships and clean-tech export – which, after all, are in the Ocasio-Cortez draft legislation – does not clarify the distinction between a people’s GND and that which Congress, pressured and pulled here and there by money, will try to implement.

This is a distinction worth drawing, since a state-business partnership based on industrial renewal will likely end up having quite a lot more in common with eco-fascism than internationalist eco-socialism.

It is here that we should think about analytical tools like environmentally unequal exchange. This is not a theory demanding castigation of northern consumerism. It is a battle-map which reminds us that social change has to account for location in order to include the most dispossessed. 

And it is a reminder that programs for eco-socialism should begin with the demands of the most dispossessed lest they be left out of plans devised elsewhere, or more simply should such plans rest on continued extraction and exploitation of the world’s poorest.

Following that, EUE also points towards alliances. On the one hand, the environmentalism of the poor in the global periphery: agro-ecological smallholders who produce much of the world’s food on relatively smaller amounts of the world’s land, and who, alongside forest-dwellers, conserve wildly disproportionate amounts of the world’s biodiversity. City-dwellers and slum-dwellers in the Third World who wish to breathe air and drink water free from the waste issuing from the kinds of development which have failed to produce First World – 

Third World convergence. The periphery as a whole, which still needs low-cost infrastructure and good homes, which need not imply massive CO2 increases. On the other, people living in the First World (including its internal periphery).

Almost no one seriously denies the need for such an alliance, although many fruitlessly try to nibble away at its socio-ecological logic, imagining the poorer world can somehow mimic the Western path to “prosperity.” But if fighting eco-fascism means eco-socialism, that means a program must allow unity-in-diversity.

Against the eco-modernizers, it means taking as axioms and not debating points La Via Campesina’s rejection of bio-fuels. Against the re-born modernization theorists, it means taking seriously the Third World’s need for massive agrarian reforms. Against those who think agriculture does not matter, it means accepting that the fruits, vegetables, and spices which people in the First World have gotten used to would either have to be grown here or be bought at fair prices. 

And against those who think metals come from a philosopher’s stone, it might mean that demands for stopping mining, as has happened in El Salvador, could send metal-intensive GNDs back to the drawing board.

Nor does the burden of transformation stop there. We as political subjects should not be guilt-ridden consumers but also frustrated and open-minded producers. People in countries like Canada and the US who wish for open borders need to seriously reconsider the “way of life” (or way of death) which induces massive migrations. Shifts in the Third and First Worlds are interwoven and iterative.

The US has a farm movement, and it could grow. There’s plenty to do – restoring ecologies and working attention-intense poly-cultures, investing in perennial replacements for soil-sapping monocultures, supporting multi-paddock carbon-dioxide-seeding grazing and efforts in Black and indigenous communities where food sovereignty and community gardens are fights for survival, and replacing unsustainable industry with sustainable manufacturing. All of these are components of turning global agriculture from a carbon-dioxide emitting sector to one which absorbs CO2.

Retooling core production also paves the way for material-use convergence between wealthier and poorer countries – the basis for a just world. Luckily, development indicators are breaking free from energy use, which means such convergence could mean a good life for everyone. This is not a call for an Arcadian fantasy, but for sustainable cities, fit neatly into their bio-regions, alongside convergent and controlled industrialization, and embedded in a planet of fields.

Defeating eco-fascism means things will have to change. That should be welcome to anyone who understands mass eco-fascism as a psycho-social commitment to a certain “way of life” at any cost. Many would be willing to surrender the fool’s gold of a car-centric suburban capitalist modernity for a life with less gewgaws and less alienation, but more clean air, more green spaces, more walking, and maybe more, but not too much more, hard work, as well, of course, as a planet in decent shape for the future. That is a future worth fighting for.

Max Ajl has a PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell University, and writes on the Tunisian national liberation struggle and post-colonial development. He is currently working on a book about ecological planning in the Anthropocene.