Future on Fire. Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change. By David Camfield. PM Press. 2022. xiv+96pp.
This is a strange book which houses apparently conflicting viewpoints by the same author. It begins with a chapter (‘The Path We’re On’) focusing on the threat to life on Earth posed by the climate and ecological crises due to capitalism’s use of fossil fuels, its unstoppable focus on ‘short-term growth of profits’, and its inevitable failure to ensure that the abundance of food produced does not reach all those who need it. The author then goes on in three further chapters to talk about how he considers this threat could possibly be averted or mitigated by various actions within the framework of capitalism. Finally, in a short closing chapter, he explains, in apparent contradiction to what came before, how the only means of averting ‘environmental calamity’ is actually to get rid of capitalism altogether and set up what he calls ‘ecosocialism’, described as ‘an ecologically rational society founded on democratic control, social equality, and the predominance of use value’ and ‘a self-governing society with a non-destructive relationship to the rest of nature’, as well as providing ‘the context for a flourishing of human diversity’. He also points out that such a society has nothing in common with the so-called ‘communism’ of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, which he describes as bureaucratic capitalist dictatorships with no aim of satisfying human needs, in the same way as all ‘existing states are capitalist states and ‘changing governments may lead to reforms, but it doesn’t alter which class rules’.
We can have no argument with analysis like this, yet, as already observed, it seems, strangely at odds with the rest of the book. Its longest chapter, for example, entitled ‘Mass Movements: Our Only Hope’, talks about how ‘collective action by large numbers of ordinary people’ can force governments into reforms, and ‘prepare people for future struggles’, since ‘the experience of defensive fights can change those who take part in them’. This, it goes on to say, can ‘open up possibilities for more far-reaching societal change’. All this smacks of the Trotskyist mantra that, if you engage people in ‘struggle’, this is likely to make them more radical and the whole thing will tip over into a mass revolutionary movement led by those who sparked the struggle in the first place. There is of course no evidence that engagement in ‘single issues’ struggle actually makes people more radical and prone to look more widely at societal change. The effect is in fact just as likely to be the opposite (i.e, disillusion), especially if the ‘struggle’ is unsuccessful. So, for example, the widespread gilets jaunes protests in France in 2018-19, which the author dwells on as a kind of model that could be followed, seem to have left little trace on the French or the wider political scene. And, in positing a scenario where capitalism completely loses control of the climate situation, he talks about the likely need to fight for reforms such as ‘sharply progressive taxes on profits, savings, and income as well as the expropriation of wealth’.
All this seems a million miles away from the ‘ecosocialist’ society of the author’s final chapter. And this is so, it seems, because the author eschews the possibility of a majority of workers (ie, all who have to sell their energies for a wage or salary) democratically voting capitalism out of existence and bringing in a genuine socialist (or ecosocialist) society. This society can in the end only be a moneyless system of free access without buying and selling. It can be nothing less than a world of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way, a society in which everyone has available to them the means to satisfy their needs and contributes freely and voluntarily to the production and distribution of the goods and services necessary for that. And perhaps the key to the apparent gulf between means and ends in this book is to be found in its constant use of the expression ‘just transition’. The author seems to see the ‘ecosocialism’ he would like as something which, if, it ever comes, will be somewhere in the far-flung future. That being the case, it is saying, we may as well try and achieve something in the ‘transition’ period (Green New Deal, ‘direct action’, free access to priority goods, etc). This ‘in the meantime’ approach is of course classic on the political left, but, as experience has shown, it can serve only to prolong the agony of capitalism, a society which, whatever the name it gives to itself, always produces inequality, rich and poor, environmental degradation, and antagonisms of all kinds. And to accept the continuation of this in any form, on the grounds that socialism can only be achieved in the very long term, shows both a failure of the imagination and an unwillingness to engage in the real ‘struggle’ of spreading consciousness of the need for that society the author himself eloquently characterises in his final chapter as ‘self-governing’, ‘ecologically rational’ and ‘founded on democratic control and social equality’.
Howard Moss
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