Reforming capitalism (2024)

Book Review from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Climate Change as Class War. Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. By Matthew T. Huber. Verso, 2023. 312pp.

American geographer Matthew Huber has produced a thought-provoking book on society and climate change. It examines in wide-ranging and immensely knowledgeable fashion how history (and in particular the history of capitalism) has got us where we are as a species and offers considered proposals for addressing the current planetary environmental crisis in a way the author sees as benefitting the majority of the population, ie, those who have to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to live.

He makes it clear from the start that his concern is for this latter group, ie, the world’s workers. And his aim – his ultimate aim anyway – is a non-class-divided society. Then of course there is the perennial question of how to achieve that, and this – in part at least – is what this book is about. However, since in the author’s view post-capitalism in terms of a classless society is not on the immediate horizon, he sees immediate action of some kind as essential, otherwise the climate crisis will engulf humanity and nothing will be left to save.

The action he advocates (focusing almost exclusively on the US situation – something he recognises) is the strongest possible pressure on government to adopt and implement ’Green New Deal’ policies (described as ‘a working-class environmental program’). Such policies would involve the government taking over the energy sector completely and instituting drastic policies of decarbonisation to achieve a ‘just transition to a clean energy economy’. One of the keys to this he sees as the overwhelming adoption and use of electricity to replace fossil fuels for the purpose of producing and supplying energy and so, in his view, avert the dire climate consequences and environmental degradation we see at present. This is because, in the author’s words, ‘electricity is at the core of almost everything we do in an increasingly digital world (…) economic activity is impossible without electricity’. He sums up his vision by saying that ‘the politics of the Green New Deal seeks to conjoin working-class and ecological interests into one, under the umbrella of a politics of life’. How will this pressure be placed on government? The author sees it as happening via sustained trade union action by workers from ‘a broad and diverse working class’, but especially those in key industries with ‘strikes and disruption at the point of production’.

Is this possible or likely? Of course, the author is perfectly right in arguing that, when trade union action is sufficiently solid and well-focused, employers and governments have no choice but to listen and may make concessions. He gives certain examples from the experience of industrial action in the US to show that ‘strikes can build power and win’. But the question then arises, what would be the consequences if such a strategy were successful in the key sector of energy and the government moved to take over the sector?

To answer this, it is worth mentioning a book possibly dating from after when Climate Change as Class War was written. This is   by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert (reviewed in the January 2023 issue of this journal), which explains how any Green New Deal agenda, even if implemented, would be no less harmful than the fossil fuel use it might seek to replace. This is because, with the money and market system still operating (even if under government supervision), the Earth would still be a target for commodification, and the process of production and setting up and maintenance of infrastructure even for ‘green’, ‘renewable’ sources of energy would continue to extract from the environment resources it could not afford to lose and in this process carry on causing climate change and destroying the Earth’s geological fabric.

So though, as already stated, Huber’s book is extraordinarily wide-ranging in the many areas and sources it draws on, would it be possible for governments, whose very function is to be, in the author’s own words, ‘committed to private capital and anarchic market competition’, to somehow change their nature and the role of managing and supporting the market system, to truly recognise ‘the inherent antagonisms between capital and the climate’ and to no longer act as an executive committee for their national owners of capital?

Then there is the author’s focus on trade unions. While unions are necessary institutions for workers to try and resist the encroachments of capital and get what they can in terms of pay and working conditions, they are by their nature defensive bodies, whose purpose is not, nor can be, ‘political’ as such. Trade unions may of course be places where political ideas circulate and where socialist consciousness may spread, but they cannot in themselves offer solutions to the fundamental inequalities inherent in the class-divided society, which the author rightly sees as fundamental to capitalism and its market system. Still less can unions be a tool for some kind of quick solution to the problems of ecological breakdown that threatens the whole planet.

So rather than look to the short-term ‘fix’ (which isn’t actually a fix at all) of action to try and force governments to take control over energy, a far more practical purpose would be served if all those who, like Matthew Huber, have striking and often subtle insights into how the world is organised, recognise the class-based nature of society and understand its highly detrimental effects both for human life and the biosphere as a whole, campaigned as part of a democratic political movement putting forward the case for majority action of the world’s people to collectively organise for a leaderless, stateless, marketless society – one that will emancipate the human species, protect the environment and look after the Earth’s ecology as a whole. That will be the real ‘just transition’.

Howard Moss

Green Lies (2023)

Book Review from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bright Green Lies. How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. Monkfish Publishing, 473pp.

‘Instead of a movement to save the planet, we have a movement to continue its destruction.’

The quotation above sums up the theme of this book which casts its glance, both politically and ecologically, way back into the past as well as projecting fascinatingly into the future. It’s definitely a must-read, a powerful, eloquent and thought-provoking indictment of industrial capitalist society, in fact of all the hierarchical human societies that have developed over the last 10-12,000 years. In compelling terms it explains – and offers incontrovertible evidence of – how, since the advent of settled agriculture and the surplus production, oppressive hierarchies, urban settlement and militarism that came with it, the Earth has been massively and increasingly despoiled in the name of human exceptionalism. Now is the end game, insist the authors, unless, that is, immediate and widespread consciousness of what humanity is doing in the name of economic growth takes over and leads to action. Yet this is something, so the book’s title asserts, that forms no part of the current ‘green’ agenda, which is seen as no less harmful than fossil fuel use in continuing to extract from the environment resources that it cannot afford to lose and in destroying in the process the earth’s geological fabric and its non-human living creatures and organisms.

The authors bring to bear a mass of sobering evidence to show that even the most proclaimed ‘bright green’ policies and actions can never be more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised capitalism which can see the Earth only as a target for commodification – for producing goods for sale on the market. They go about systematically – and in many cases scathingly – dismantling the arguments put forward to remedy this by ‘deep green’ gurus such as Naomi Klein, Lester Brown and Mark Jacobson (the latter described as ‘someone working hard to kill the planet in order to save it’). And, in the process, they exhibit a breathtaking knowledge, both wide-ranging and detailed, of why all the many attempts at apparently environment-friendly activities amount to anything but and can only serve to add further to both climate change and the destruction of the environment. None of the ‘green’ policies widely presented as beneficial escape forensic – and damning – analysis under their gaze. So their book, in its various sections, takes apart and condemns as ‘lies’ the proclaimed virtues of, among other green ‘solutions’, solar panels, wind turbines, green energy storage, recycling, LED lights, electric cars, hydropower, biomass (described as ‘cutting down and burning forests’), and geothermal energy.

In all these cases, their fundamental argument, backed by abundant evidence and analysis, is that the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain all these ‘renewable’ activities and technologies actually relies on fossil fuels involving at least as much savage exploitation of the Earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as that involved in ‘non-green’ methods of production. In other words these ‘green’ technologies will carry on with what they term the ‘orgy of planetary destruction’. They will continue to rip the Earth apart to procure materials for their projects, will continue to hack to oblivion the planet’s natural structures formed over millions of years, and will continue to blow up mountains, turn forests into mines and poison water, air, soil, wildlife and the human population. These are all, in the authors’ words, ‘assaults against the living world’ causing ‘industrial-scale devastation’, and all claims for saving the environment by their use are dismissed as ‘green veneer’, as ‘cherry-picking’ of the facts and the available evidence.

The point, they argue, is that, much as the ‘bright greens’ may be genuinely concerned for the environment, the reality of what they propose and may do can never amount to more than ‘greenwashing’, given that the current system of industrial production cannot by its nature do other than subordinate real care for the Earth and its flora and fauna to the imperatives of growth and production for profit. It prioritises ‘fuelling the economy over saving the real world’. Attempts to suggest otherwise are, the authors insist, ‘green fantasies’, no more nor less than delusions providing comfort at the expense of reality. All this is summed up in their dictum ‘Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.’

So are we going to hell in a handcart no matter what? Well, sort of, according to this book, except that there is a chapter toward the end entitled ‘Real Solutions’, in which the authors do suggest how we might reverse or at least mitigate part of the increasing mess they have so painstakingly and passionately detailed and evidenced. The trouble is that this is the least satisfactory and least convincing part of the book. That’s because what they mainly have to offer are appeals to individuals or groups to get together in forms of environmental action (‘find something you love and defend it. A stream, a stand of trees, a struggling songbird’), or a call for ‘massive movements… using every tactic: political pressure, legal challenge, economic boycotts, civil disobedience and whatever else becomes necessary’, or, above all, appeals to governments to adopt various policies that will curb both industrial growth and population growth (eg, ‘governments need to stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities’). This after apparently recognising that governments are an integral part of the problem in their role of managing and supporting the growth/market system that leads to the very problems they abhor and so will not and cannot ‘act against the profit motive’. Or perhaps, despite such words, they somehow don’t take it fully on board and think it can somehow be different, perhaps in the same way as the ‘bright greens’ they criticise don’t want to believe that the profit system will brook no alternative to economic growth and unbridled exploitation of the Earth’s environment. Perhaps, in fact, at bottom Jensen, Keith and Wilbert do think, or at least hope, that governments can somehow be neutral and possess the power to regulate to their heart’s content the system of production for profit and buying and selling.

The reality is that capitalism with its commodification of everything has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. But the way to prevent this going any further and reversing it as necessary is not via tweaks to the way we live and work today but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to collectively organise a leaderless, stateless society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole environment of which we are a part, including its geology and its flora and fauna.

Howard Moss

Depths of alienation (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Culture of Make-Believe. Derrick Jensen, New York, Context Books, 2002

The Future of Success. Robert B. Reich, New York, Knopf, 2001

The stream of books coming out of America on the Holy Global Empire of capitalism continues unabated. The tale is of two classes: arrogant winners and collateral losers, private wealth and public poverty, triumphalist insecurity for the elite and traumatic insecurity for the mass. The system is enthusiastically praised, superficially criticised, but never seriously opposed. There Is No Alternative - or, if you prefer the sporting metaphor, capitalism is the only game in town.

With Derrick Jensen's 700-page blockbuster you get more or less what it says in the blurb: “the atrocities that characterise so much of our culture - from . . .  modern slavery and corporate misdeeds to manufacturing disasters, death squads in developing nations and the destruction of the natural world”. The text is discursive, even gabby. There is no index, which suggests that the author wants you to read it as a novel for entertainment, not a polemic for study.

To give Jensen his due, he's good on slavery:

“. . . the power relationship between slaveholders and slaves can be broken into three components. The first is social, and involves the use or threat of violence by the slaveholder to control the slave. The second is psychological, and has to do with convincing the slaves to perceive their slavery as actually being in their own best interests. The third is cultural, and has to do with transforming force into a right of the powerful and obedience into a duty of the powerless. . .”

He can't bring himself to explicitly oppose wage slavery and the capitalist system of which it is an integral part. Instead he seeks to shock us with the revelation that his solution is to get rid of civilisation. On the last page we get a sanitised biblical story: the appropriately-named Ham, rather than being condemned to perpetual enslavement, feels a happy, fecund sense of freedom.

As an economist, Robert Reich is more upfront about capitalism, which he takes for better and for worse. The good news is for consumers, who can "shift allegiance with the click of a mouse" because they live in "the age of the terrific deal". But the bad news is about quality of non-consuming life: more frenzy, less security, loss of time and energy for friendship, community and self.

Reading through Reich's prose, with its chapter heads like “Of geeks and shrinks” and “The sale of the self”, gives the impression that the author is writing about and for people very much like himself. Of the 6 billion people in the world only perhaps a billion or so have regular employment, and by no means all of those worry about their CV and how they present themselves at interview. Yet Reich asserts that:

“In the new economy, you get ahead not by being well liked but being well marketed… Talented people are even selling shares in themselves… Once, the worst thing that could be said of someone was that he had sold out. Now the worst thing that can be said is that he's not selling”.

By this reckoning, capitalism has plunged depths of alienation that Marx could only have had nightmares about.

Stan Parker