Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Change everything (2015)

Book Review from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate’, by Naomi Klein, Allen Lane, 2014, £20

Oh what a bittersweet day: a book that makes you want to jump for joy about a topic which occasions floods of tears. Naomi Klein’s latest work should be widely read. She is bang on the money: the climate change argument is about capitalism. In short, free markets and sustainability are mutually exclusive, and either capitalism or the ecosystem has had its day. The slew of evidence on display is impressive – Klein is nothing if not a thorough case builder – and the whole book can be seen as a superb illustration of the class system at work.  She catalogues examples of the narratives being bent to suit vested interests and the dominant ideology: many parts of this we could not have written better ourselves. Talk about capitalism bearing the seeds of its own destruction.

It has always struck me as odd that so many of the rich and powerful behaved as if they had another planet to escape to, or that somehow they could end up breathing their own wealth if the atmosphere became problematic. Why on earth were they funding climate change denial movements if they themselves would also suffer when the stuff hits the fan – as 97 percent of those who know have agreed is going to happen? Klein solves this one: the climate challenge is such a threat to their ideology that they simply cannot tolerate it: the measures necessary to forestall disaster require such concerted effort that it would be essential to curtail the very market freedoms so dear to them and their position. Much like the dictators of yore, they’d rather bring all down with them than give up power; or maybe more like Magda Goebbels, the world was not worth living in for her or her family without the primacy of their Weltanschaung. Having spent the last 30 years unleashing the tiger of the neoliberal agenda, they were not going to let some bunch of green eggheads spoil the party.  This would be intolerably bad for business and thereby very bad for their interests.

As someone concerned about the environment since my teens (don’t ask…), I ended up in the Green Party.  However I left a while back as I was unconvinced about their attitude to power: how they would force vested interests to toe the line.  I came to the same general conclusion as Klein – capitalism has to go – and realised that without this step, all else on the environmental agenda is playing for time.  However here is where she and I might part company: the way forward and the alternative political landscape offered in her book is too hazy.  It is as if she pulls her punches in the last round for fear of scaring off the readers – the book is after all aimed at the mainstream  – or perhaps she really has not thought it through properly.

Her suggestion that protests and actions will emerge which must be exploited to promote the agenda is too haphazard and hazy. What is the over-arching political philosophy which will give such emergent forces any direction apart from the environment and opposition to capitalism?  The peg on which to hang the clothing of serious change is lacking in this book. Come on Naomi, at heart you’re one of us, if only you’d realise it – you can’t offer a solution without socialism.  Ducking the real question seems a bit odd after what you have written and what you plainly believe.  But  I still welcome this book like few others. In the current climate anyone who starts asking the right questions has to be congratulated.
Howard Pilott

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