Not us, them
When we cast climate change as a collective failure, we obscure the real culprit: capitalism
By Brocken InagloryThis image was edited byUser:CillanXC - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Welcome to a new year and a lot of not-new issues. The week began ignominiously, as elected officials throughout virtually every level of government insisted that schools open on January 3rd without the kinds of resources they would need to do so safely and consistently. The predictable result has been chaos. The Biden administration, for its part, appears to have accepted that the needs of the economy supersede all other concerns. In Washington, DC-speak, there’s no political will to do anything other than barrel forward and hope for the best.
The omicron wave is a powerful reminder that humans live on a planet we can’t control, assurances from the tech-bro set not withstanding. It’s also been a reminder of a lesson that too many workers have been forced to learn since March 2020: your boss doesn’t care if you live or die. Or, a better way of saying that is, owners of capital see labor as nothing more than a resource to be exploited to the hilt. What makes labor special is that, without it, capitalists can’t make any profit. No workers, no return on investment. Take workers out of the equation, even for a short period, and the whole system comes apart.
Capitalism requires constant movement, constant production, constant circulation. Quarantine lockdowns, strikes, supply chain bottlenecks — these are anathema to the capitalist process. If a firm can somehow keep production going when others have been forced to slow down, they’ll capture a greater share of the market. So the person who owns the company you work for might care about you on an interpersonal level, but the requirements of competition and growth mean that structurally, you’re just another lump of coal for the fire.
Speaking of! “Scientists say there's reason to expect even more menacing extreme weather disasters in 2022,” Axios reported on Monday. Last year saw record heat waves, droughts, flooding, and wild fires across the United States and the rest of the world, often outpacing forecasters’ predictions. Kai Kornhuber, a Columbia University climate scientist told Axios: "It seems as if models do underestimate those extremes and particularly these scenarios are really hard to predict and also to prepare for."
It’s hard to write about climate change in a way that doesn’t feel apocalyptic and hopeless. One way to step away from the brink — at least analytically if not yet practically — is to refine the way we think about the task at hand, and specifically about who is the culprit.
It’s very common when reading about climate change to hear broad recriminations of society at large. We’ve wasted the last 30 years since scientists first rang the alarm bell. The world turned a blind eye while temperatures kept rising. I thought about climate change in those terms for years. It was only after spending a lot more time with socialists that I saw the value in reframing the issue, not as one of collective failure to act but as the success of a relatively small number of actors in business and government whose project is essentially to burn the planet for short term profit.
There’s a debate among environmental and social scientists about what to call the current geological age. On one side is the term “Anthropocene,” roughly the age of humans. That is to say, human behavior has changed the Earth to such a degree that it constitutes a new planetary epoch.
Jason Moore, environmental historian and sociologist at Binghamton University, has offered another term: “Capitalocene.” What’s changing — destroying — the planet, he argues, isn’t humans, per se. It’s the economic system we live under. From at least the industrial revolution onward, the demands of capitalism have been constant growth and expansion, powered by extracting fossil fuels that have flooded our atmosphere with carbon emissions.
“Capitalocene is a kind of critical provocation to this sensibility of the Anthropocene, which is: We have met the enemy and he is us,” Moore told Wired in 2019. “So the idea that we're all going to cover our footprints, we're going to be more sustainable consumers, we're going to pay attention to population, are really consequences of a highly unequal system of power and wealth.”
Where the concept of the Anthoropocene threatens to treat human behavior as an undifferentiated lump sum, Capitalocene recognizes the existing economic and social relations that have organized the world since the emergence of capitalism in the 15th Century. Moore also prefers Capitalocene because it correctly centers production, rather than consumption, as the primary driver of climate change. It also debunks the idea of “ethical consumerism,” which places the responsibility for skyrocketing greenhouse gas levels on some poor shmuck at the grocery store, rather than the entire set of systems that got that package of chicken into said shmuck’s hand in the first place. It’s not an accident that the concept of “personal carbon footprint” was created in 2004 by oil-giant BP, with the help of PR firm Ogilvy & Mather, to redirect blame towards the individual and away from industrial scale polluters.
Capitalocene also has the added bonus of being politically actionable, in addition to analytically clarifying. If the problem is human beings writ large, the available political solutions are totally opaque. But if the problem is capitalism, that at least points to the theoretical solution of ecosocialism.
This kind of clarity is all the more necessary because with each coming extreme weather event, resource-driven conflict, or climate-change-induced pandemic, the urge to assign blame will become more acute. We know what that means for the far right — they will blame China, or communists in general, or migrants, or the libs who don’t want to drill, baby, drill. There is a real risk of ecofascist ideas getting mainstreamed. Climate change denial on the right is already on the wane. What’s replacing it is explicit, violent xenophobia and a call to physically harden borders so that the deserving volk don’t need to share their precious and scarce resources with the undeserving Other.
The left can offer a counter-narrative that’s not available to liberals and centrists. There is a force that’s cooking the planet, and it’s not simply a few massive energy companies who can be regulated at the margins. Rather, it is the capitalist mode of production, under-girded by bourgeois state power, that is threatening the future of human life on this planet. This interlacing system of incentives, assumptions, and power relations don’t require any individual person or firm to act maliciously, though many fossil fuel companies obviously have. All that’s required is a need for profit.
It also means that any individual cannot confront the issue as an individual. Though the cause of the problem is not collective, the solution to it must be. The only way forward is through mass politics aimed squarely at the root of the problem, with the aim towards taking and exercising power, not simply demanding concessions from the architects of this geological age.