The politics of a climate change movement

Let’s start with a disclaimer. The views expressed in what follows are mine and don’t represent anyone’s position. The attendance at the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) conference at the weekend was significantly down on last year – by 30-40% depending on whose estimate you listen to. This is more than a blip. The largest…

Liam

June 16, 2008

3–4 minutes

Let’s start with a disclaimer. The views expressed in what follows are mine and don’t represent anyone’s position.

The attendance at the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) conference at the weekend was significantly down on last year – by 30-40% depending on whose estimate you listen to. This is more than a blip. The largest climate march was in Britain was in 2006 and they have been smaller in subsequent years – almost in inverse proportion to the amount of serious media coverage of the issue. A paradox is that the CACC trade union conference earlier this year nearly matched this weekend’s event for numbers. A difference is that most of the people at that event were there because they had been motivated by their union or another organisation while last weekend’s conference had more the feel of a collection of individuals.

There is a clause in CACC’s mission statement which says; “The CCC aims to bring together as many people as possible who support our broad aims of pushing for urgent action on climate and reducing global emissions. The CCC does not therefore campaign on the important but more detailed questions of how best to achieve these emission reductions and recognises that supporters will have different and deeply held views on these issues.” A desire to avoid very detailed discussions on which energy source is superior to another is understandable but in practice what happens is that by avoiding any detailed discussion of specific proposals, steps and demands that the campaign can make it is led into an impasse.

Australians have more reason than many to be worried about the impact of climate change. They are after all conducting a mining operation on the continent’s water supply. However the Walk Against Warming in November 2007 had 115 000 participants. That’s the equivalent of well over 500 000 in Britain. The Climate Movement of Australia was demanding tangible measures, in particular radically higher renewable energy targets and better public transport.

Contrast this to clause 3 in CACC’s mission statement which says; “the CCC seeks a global solution to a global problem and aims to push for an international emissions reductions treaty that is both effective in preventing the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate and equitable in the means of so doing…The CCC aims to campaign against those with the greatest responsibility for preventing or delaying the progress we urgently need towards an international climate treaty.”

Two consequences flow from this approach. The first is an utterly laudable desire to draw attention to the American way of life as a contributor to global warming often deflects the campaign from placing demands on the British government. The second is that the slogan “What do we want? An international emissions reductions treaty! When do we want it? Now!” lacks the pulling power of demands around cheap, clean reliable public transport or taking the railways back into public ownership. Admittedly climate change demonstrations in Australia don’t involve walking in freezing December downpours through London but it does seem apparent that focusing the demonstrations on achievable demands and situating the movement in its international context has resulted in the Australian movement growing bigger, faster and more consistently than the British campaign.

Reflecting on the conference it seemed to me that it lacked an opportunity for participants to think through the implications of the different approaches. Jonathan Neale commented that everyone who was there had a basic grasp of the science (very basic in my case) and knows just how serious and urgent the threat is. So in some respects there was not so much need for a series of plenary speakers to throw light on that but a real necessity to allow a chance for a strategic reassessment of how the movement can broaden and in particular what groups of people it needs to start reaching out to. The trade union conference showed that there is real potential to build the movement strongly in the unions and with the social and political weight that they can provide help it become the real mass movement that the situation demands.

56 responses to “The politics of a climate change movement”

bill j

June 16, 2008 at 8:53 pm

Agree with this. The problem with the CCC is that it is oriented to winning legislation in Parliament. Hence the very top table heavy and legalistic approach.
It is by passed by the direct action wing of the movement, who occupied the DRAX coal train recently for example, as a result.

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Pop goes the weasel

June 17, 2008 at 9:19 am

Liam thanks for your report and comments.I think it’s good to make a clear assessment of what is going on.

A few thoughts.

I wasn’t at the conference but attended the earlier encouraging trade union climate change conference and all the annual climate change marches, which, as you point out have actually declined in numbers over the years.

The recent Heathrow demonstration was impressive but there doesnt appear to be a united climate change movement.The potential is huge just as the issue is vast.

The other point is that much of the climate change camp movement is developing on anarchist basis and has it’s own means and ways of working.Sometimes effective, often hit and miss.To what extent it is either growing or declining I dont know.What I do know is that there is a great suspicion and distrust of the Left and particularly of the SWP.

It has to be said that much of the disparate Left is not helping much either in that it is simply grafting on global climate change or ‘the environment’ and isnt really seriously looking at the issue but is opportunistically using it without fully explaining it in a comprehensive way or sufficently integrating it into it’s marxist or whatever critique and analysis of capitalism and it’s respective future vision of socialism.No change!

If one thing global climate does mean it means change whether capitalist or socialist.What is needed is a clear expose of the voracious capitalist growth model , carbon consumption and the destruction of the global eco system(the dwindling rain forests ‘were’ our lungs, the polar system ‘was’ our balance) , the root causes and as I think you suggest ,an agreed upon practical AND sustainable(the word has become appropriated out of existence) policy programme which people can campaign for things such as an integrated public transport system, democratically run , publically owned renewable supplies of energy etc

On one level the latent potential is huge with Greenpeace,Friends of the Earth and other ‘environmental ‘ groups having massive growing memberships (as far as I understand it).This membership is however largely passive and ‘conservative’ and not clearly not presently prepeared to be either mobilised or politicised.

The lack of any real growth of the Green party and on the Left is another symptom of this present malaise, though that is another issue.

Like so much else, the anti war movement just as with the global climate change movement there’s alot of talk and hot air but large numbers of people appear to be either placid and indifferent at the present time expecting governments and the capitalist system to sort out the mess(no chance!), shop with a green bag (instead of plastic) and ‘do their bit’ by recyling and then basically carry on as usual or they are willing to attend a token one off demonstration then conclude that it changes nothing , go back home and carry on shopping.

The fact is that the level of climate change denial is collosal and the media reinforces this.Governments want their cakes and want to eat them so they dont really want to have to make people aware and educate people into what is really happening and how we as a society and people living on this Planet need to living differently or have to cope with changes in how we live because it upsets the highly profitable capitalist satus quo

What to do?

Look at the present global capitalist crisis re food and fuel prices and the correlation with the present imperialist propaganda wars on Iraq, increased troops to Afghanistan and especially the upping of the ante on Iran and Venezuela for more IMPERIALIST WARS, GLOBAL CAPITALIST DOMINATION AND CONTROL OF OIL, this is merely a foretaste of what is to come.

I’m not too keen on the term ‘eco socialism’ but this is a vision that has to be made practical and accessible, relevant and responsive, not just in the future but in the here and now.

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a very public sociologist

June 17, 2008 at 2:25 pm

Without getting to trainspotterly, what was the composition of the conference like? Was it mainly far left + greens + occasional Labour lefts?

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Derek Wall

June 17, 2008 at 2:48 pm

…well lots of greens, lots of less political environmentalists, far left were pretty much SWP and SR, no sign of Labour…other than a Labour GLA member did a workshop with Darren Johnson.

I think the consensus amongst ecosocialists is to work with the climate camp/diy movement, push trade union action and work with indigenous people….that certainly seems to be the case with both Green Left and SR.

Viva Jack Mundy and Hugo Blanco and Climate Camp

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Roy

June 17, 2008 at 4:40 pm

Thanks for posting this report Liam. I think your assessment is spot on. I also agree with Adamski’s comment in response to an earlier post, where he said: “In building the group there has been the idea of the campaign in its slogans leaving the question of solutions to the climate crisis open-ended …. Personally, I think that this approach has now served its usefulness and there are several very broad demands that we could unite a broad movement on climate change around.”

Adamski is correct. There is a widely held misconception that the best way to build the biggest movement is to raise the least radical demand. This approach doesn’t bear up to historical scrutiny. The Bolsheviks didn’t demand a treaty to end the first world war, they demanded peace. CND didn’t accede to the establishment position of ‘multilateralism’, it correctly prioritized the demand for unilateral disarmament. I think we need a similar approach to climate change. The best way to secure global emissions reductions would be to fight and win real emissions reductions in our own country. Adamski also pinpoints the three key areas where this needs to happen: domestic housing, transport and power generation.

Exactly what our demands should be is something we need to discuss and debate. My own view is that we should demand ZERO CARBON HOUSING FOR ALL (which implies a massive expansion of high quality social housing, plus government funded insulation of the existing housing stock), FREE MASS PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION (i.e. public transport should be a service rather than a source of profit, in the same way as health and education are generally recognized, by workers at least, as free public services; and we also need to shift all freight from road to rail,) and ZERO CARBON POWER GENERATION. All of these are transitional demands in that they cannot be satisfied by the market, or indeed by the private sector, but they can nevertheless be understood as necessary measures even at existing levels of social consciousness. The question of nationalization (to which I would add the question of workers control) are then posed as consequences of the climate-related demands, and as necessary pre-requisites to achieving them.

The campaign also needs to think about which social forces will fight for these demands. It is clearly not going to be the NGOs or the green-small-business milieu, which is where much of the environmental movement (including the direct action wing) is currently based. We must look instead to building a mass base for this campaign amongst working class communities, the organized labour movement and the youth. Of course, it isn’t enough merely to criticize the CCC or even to point it in the right direction. Socialists need to actively engage in both fighting for a class perspective within the campaign and also building the campaign inside the working class.

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Andy Newman

June 17, 2008 at 5:46 pm

Roy: “The Bolsheviks didn’t demand a treaty to end the first world war, they demanded peace. ”

I know this is a bit of a distraction, but not only DID the Bolsheviks actually seek and sign a treaty to end the German advance on 3rd march 1918, but they sought military aid from America, Britain and France for continuing the war against Germany.

So you can have all the utopian slogans you want, but at some stage you need government power to implement them, and then you have to face realities.

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redbedhead

June 17, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Roy – I think you’re on the right track there. Those are areas that are clear and concrete and connect with working class experience. I think it needs to be tweaked a bit: demanding “zero carbon” and “free mass transit”, etc. are likely to be seen as being “unrealistic”. But I think some specific, comprehensible policy objectives with sourced funding – which is just a high-falutin’ way of saying, “ok, you’ve got $12 billion for war (in the case of Canada’s military budget last time I checked), then you should be able to earmark $12 billion for transit expansion.” If 85% of all new house construction is low density (pulling that figure out of my butt), then 75% of all new housing permits will have to be high density and must achieve x levels of energy efficiency, including solar panels, water recyclers, etc. And 100% of all government housing must be high density, high efficiency housing. There should be incentives to convert low density into higher density, with retail and residential integrated to minimize the need for car travel. Plus there must be hard rules against further urban sprawl, which will also push in the direction of higher density.

I’m obviously just creating arbitrary numbers here but what I think is that we need to find the figures that are “saleable” to people at present levels of consciousness and push the envelope on “common sense” but aren’t so far out there that they are easily portrayed as “unrealistic” “absurd” etc. If it’s too absolute people will say “well, you can’t get it all at once.”

I don’t claim to know precisely what the balance is, and it will vary from country to country depending on local traditions of mobilizing and levels of consciousness around the issues. But, I think, finding those key few demands that can mobilize and focus sentiment will be important to the further development of the movement.

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PhilW

June 17, 2008 at 8:02 pm

I think Roy is on the right track too. Redbedhead I think is going too much into details, if what we are talking about is slogans for a campaign. We need to understand, though, that these slogans/demands would generate their own discussions and those who support them would have to have some back-up in order to defend raising these demands. This is where the arguments about funding would come in, but I think more as polemical points, like “if you can spend £50bn on war and £50bn on bailing out Northern Rock, you can spend that much and more on saving the planet”.

I don’t thin the demands are unrealistic, in the sense that they are completely non-realisable. They are simply ant-capitalist. When Andy says a government needs to implement them, then the answer is “of course it does, and if the present one won’t, then a workers’ government will”. If Andy is arguing that inevitably a workers’ government would have to compromise on these demands, then I disagree.

I think that the demand that raises the most interesting issues is the housing one. Most housing is old, and the replacement rate in UK is something like 0.1% (20,000 out of over 20 million), which means that our houses will have to last 1000 years! There are 5.8 million houses with cavity wall insulation, 9.2m with cavity walls but no insulation and 6.5 million with no cavity walls. This last category cannot be insulated, except by lining the walls inside or outside and I think that neither this nor cavity wall insulation itself is enough to make a zero carbon house: it needs to be combined with the demand for zero carbon power generation in some way: otherwise you are still using gas (mainly) for heating.

I think this demand raises issues about the whole housing “market” (if it wasn’t already being raised by the sub-prime crisis). In my opinion, a just and equitable solution to climate change would require wholesale reorganisation of housing (nationalise the whole lot?), getting the rich out of their big mansions and second homes and providing housing that isn’t simply based on the nuclear family. This is also necessary because of the impending crisis that will come about as the baby-boomers enter old age.

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Andy Newman

June 17, 2008 at 9:29 pm

PhilW

“I don’t thin the demands are unrealistic, in the sense that they are completely non-realisable. They are simply ant-capitalist. When Andy says a government needs to implement them, then the answer is “of course it does, and if the present one won’t, then a workers’ government will”. If Andy is arguing that inevitably a workers’ government would have to compromise on these demands, then I disagree.”

Actually I am saying nothing of the sort.

I beleive that the sort of radical solutions outlined here are necessary. I also think that the more concrete the demands the easiier it is to build the campaign.

I also think that such radical action to prevent climate change is both possible and there we have more chance of acheiving it under capitalism then we do of overthrowing capitalism.

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Dave Riley

June 18, 2008 at 2:52 am

POST:”Australians have more reason than many to be worried about the impact of climate change. They are after all conducting a mining operation on the continent’s water supply. However the Walk Against Warming in November 2007 had 115 000 participants. That’s the equivalent of well over 500 000 in Britain”

ME:That is correct but also terribly misleading. This was a national rally planned well in advance to occur just before the November federal election so while it had a climate change focus it also aggregated a lot of other issues by default.

It was an anti Howard rally under a climate change umbrella. So it is a long bow to suggest that this represented the present state & strength of the climate change movement in Australia. Presently that is rather amorphous or, as in some cases, events are patented by some peak environment lobby groups.

A test of the movement’s strength will be the Climate Emergency Rally in Melbourne on July 5. see here. Note the breadth of the endorsements.

But things are moving fast as a series of convergences and conferences across the country are sponsoring a keener focus on a mass action perspective. Related to this capacity to grow is the consequences of the anti-electricity privatisation movement in New South Wales and the campaign against the Gunn’s Paper Pulp mill in Tasmania.

In this regard the CCSC statement is an attempt to bring this together on a campaign footing. Read it here.

Our view is that there needs to a lot of mix and match to consolidate the sort of alliances that can be fostered into being around this issue. But if you read the statement you’ll note that the willingness to address concrete issues is up front. and the ‘differences’ — where they exist — are meant as something to continue to discuss.

Our advantage, as Liam suggests, is that there is strong environmentalist history here — esp over the Franklin Dam and uranium mining — especially too as that relates to indigenous rights. But coal! Now there’s a real challenge as the whole resources boom is shielding the Australian economy from the downturns elsewhere and the whole mining sector is in boom. This is why the Australia/China nexus is so important to the local bourgeoisie.

Related to this is the Northern Territory land grab where the federal government has invaded and seized control of indigenous communities under cover of protecting children from sexual abuse. The whole land rights versus mining issue is a festering sore here, you see.

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Adamski

June 18, 2008 at 10:19 am

Andy: “I also think that such radical action to prevent climate change is both possible and there we have more chance of acheiving it under capitalism then we do of overthrowing capitalism.”

Of course, all these things are achievable under capitalism to some extent, I think they are anti-capitalist in that they challenge the logic of the system and free market economics – which is why the political establishment resist them.

Free public transport is achievable under capitalism but it begins to hint at a different way of organising society.

For example, free public transport has been tried and worked. Historically in Red Bologna in the 70s and in the age of neoliberalism in the Belgian city of Hasselt where use of public transport roacketed by 1000% when they switched to a zero-fare system. Cheap public transport works too under the GLC and in Sheffield in 80s (when one David Blunkett boasted we are cutting fares, abolishing them for pensioners as the first step in our ultimate goal of free public transport)

However, while free public transport would be a good demand for the left to be making now, I’m still unsure if it would be a good demand for CCC at this moment , perhaps better to adopt something more concrete like nationalisation of the railways and cheap public transport as a more concrete demand and then raise the issue of free public transport within that debate?

Free house insulation for every house seems possibly unreasonable, the advances made under capitalism by local councils show that we are right to demand more radical action: Five per cent of all the solar energy generated in the UK is concentrated in Kirklees, the council implemented a scheme for 30,000 homes to receive free cavity wall and loft insulation. Unfortunately, I hear some of these measures were introduced in exchange for Green Party councillors voting for cuts in other local services.

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redbedhead

June 18, 2008 at 10:30 am

PhilW wrote: “Redbedhead I think is going too much into details, if what we are talking about is slogans for a campaign.”

Perhaps you are correct. I do sometimes get lost in details. But I think that slogans that feel too absolute won’t wash with working class people and will feel impossibilist, which undermines their credibility. I mentioned in another post in the “Georgism” piece by Liam that in Canada a number of years ago there was a popular housing campaign which sought (and won) city councils to declare housing a national disaster and for the very concrete demand of 1% of the federal budget to be directed towards housing as a means to solve the housing crisis. They touted this as the “1% Solution” and for a while there were buttons all over the place. The point being there are creative ways to generate slogans that can connect with sentiment in a way that people feel is relevant and realistic.

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Adamski

June 18, 2008 at 10:34 am

The transitional demands we need were mapped out very well by Jonathan Neale in 2005:
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9469

This was written at a time I think when the biggest demo against climate change in the world had been 5000 people!

The question of how to build a mass movement on climate change is complex. Unlike stopping the war or keeping a hospital open achieving sustainability essentially means changing the whole way society is run. For example, simple demo’s on climate change are not the only thing, we need is to start bringing an ecological component to all the different struggles we are involved in. The trade union conference called by CCC was a big step forward.

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bill j

June 18, 2008 at 11:20 am

Interesting link, I think this is the key paragraph;
“To build the really wide coalition we need, we can’t start by getting consensus on either the scale of the problem or the solutions. Any real movement will include many people who emphasise individual lifestyle solutions, or accept that the market is here to stay. It will include people who want George Bush to sign Kyoto and people who reject Kyoto out of hand as useless, people who hate cars and people who buy hybrids. For the moment, we can argue about the solutions. Those arguments will only be real, and produce real answers, once we have built a movement that can imagine forcing them through. ”

Neale separates building the movement from the politics you argue for in it. Basically it he says, these are only differences of opinion, what we should do is argue about them inside, but the main thing is just getting on with building the broad mass movement.
This tunes in with his rejection of the nationalisation of the rail and emphasis on going to church.
But in fact the movement will only be built by fighting for solutions – in other words what the movement fights will be key to building it. The disagreements are not just differences of opinion, but differences over what we fight for and how we fight.
Neales abstention on all that explains his alliance with the liberal/church wing.

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Adamski

June 18, 2008 at 12:26 pm

I think however the article was written in a completely different period, hard though it is to imagine three years ago the biggest ever demo in the world was 5000 people, in that period this methodology has some validity, in my opinion it has now served its usefulness. I think not raising more concrete demands is now an obstacle to building the movement.

I’ve never heard Neale claim that the liberal/church wing was the key force to saving the planet, he did mention when he spoke here in passing finding that he was talking to more diverse organisations than usual, and he also mentioned his surprise that these audiences were quite receptive to a radical message.

JN has a book coming out called “Stop Climate Change – Change the World”, so we will have a greater idea of his current thinking.

JN is also in a delicate position, CCC was not set up by socialists and as far as I know he is the only socialist on its leadership. The last AGM I went to, I got the impression that a lot of the Green Party types felt threatened by the socialists and objected to a suggestion to add the SSP to the national committee of the campaign (this was pre-split). And there was the matter that the steering group kept on blocking Galloway speaking on National Demo’s.

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bill j

June 18, 2008 at 1:47 pm

Well sure I maybe over stating things with regard to JN, although not much, he is against a class movement and supports a broad non-class popular front without any concrete policies.
His more rabble rowsing speech, that’s hes repeated round the country this year, took the example of how FDR had mobilised the resources of the US state against the war, as his inspiration for the fight against climate change. Nothing in the slightest bit socialist about that.
I did go to the CCC national meeting last year – it was right wing, oriented to liberal lobbying and changing law, JN didn’t stand out from the crowd.
At the national meeting in Manchester, where I saw JN speak in a more intimate environment so to speak, he was similarly on the right of every issue, totally indistinguishable from the greens. So I can’t imagine why the leadership would have been bothered by his presence. They certainly didn’t appear to be.

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redbedhead

June 18, 2008 at 2:54 pm

billj – your misrepresentation of Neale’s argument and your conclusion that he is against a “class movement” is absolutely absurd. The argument you quote from is very obviously a tactical discussion about where the development of consciousness is at in that moment and what is necessary to move it forward. It is not a snapshot meant to freezeframe things where they are at. Nor is using the example of FDR anti-socialist. The point is that the capitalist state can find the resources when it determines something is a priority and placing demands on that state is a means to mobilize people and expose the class nature of the state.
As for your silly slag about Neale being in alliance with the church. I’m not even sure what the heck this means – is part of a steering committee involving the pope, the Bishop of Canterbury and Jimmy Swaggart? You may have heard of the Sandinista revolution – which was an alliance involving significant sections of the Nicaraguan church and the Left. Or Bishop Desmond Tutu or Bishop Romero in El Salvador. Or the role of the Unitarian Church and the Quakers in anti-war movements and the pro-choice movement. Or the Black Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in the south. Or Malcolm X. Your narrow conception of who should be in the movement is stunning.

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Andy Newman

June 18, 2008 at 2:58 pm

I agree with what Bill J writes here “in fact the movement will only be built by fighting for solutions – in other words what the movement fights will be key to building it. The disagreements are not just differences of opinion, but differences over what we fight for and how we fight.”

BUt we shouldn’t assume that radical solutions can only be avcheived by socialism, or that our only alies in putting forward radical solutions will be the hard left.

Indeed, it is far from impossible to imagine church people signing up to radical solutions.

After all, if capitalism could switch all its energy into munitions in the second world war, then we cannot rule out an equally robust response to climate change being compatible with capitalism.

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Roy

June 18, 2008 at 5:18 pm

Whether or not a sufficiently ‘robust response to climate change is compatible with capitalism’ boils down to this: Can the capitalist class tolerate in the near future a decisive switch away from fossil fuels? This is a very important question, and one which should be considered not in the abstract but in relation to the actual global balance of class forces.

A huge proportion of fixed capital is permanently tied up in fossil fuel related industries (principally oil, auto and aerospace). This is no minor detail. The world’s most powerful monarchs, oligarchs and other assorted billionaires would be bankrupted overnight were this capital to be rapidly devalued. They will not take this lying down. Nor can ‘green’ capitalists simply step into their shoes at the top of the hierarchy; they have to compete (for that is the nature of their system) on a playing field designed, built and ruled by that section of capital which is most powerful and which is literally drenched in oil.

The measures needed to avert climate change will not therefore be achieved by a transfer of power within the capitalist class, but will necessitate a decisive shift in the balance of class forces in favour of our class; and this will happen only if there is a massive upsurge of class struggle.

The guiding principal in formulating our demands is therefore not whether they are reasonable, but whether they offer credible solutions to the crisis. If any measure is effective it will be deemed unreasonable because the ruling class do not consider it reasonable that we should bankrupt them. The idea that we can mobilise millions of workers on the basis of demands that we ourselves know won’t work is not a transitional approach, it is a recipe for disaster.

As Jonathan Neale points out in the article quoted above, we need to replace the private automobile, not supplement it. This is wholly unreasonable but absolutely necessary. Cheap public transport won’t do it. Free public transport might, particularly if combined with progressively expanding restrictions on car use (such as car free zones, reserved allocation of motorway lanes to coaches etc.) I also think that this demand would be a more obvious solution, both to workers and to the ‘greens’, than nationalisation per se (although of course nationalisation would follow as an inevitable consequence.) British Rail was a nationalised corporation, but it was a capitalist corporation nonetheless, and did little to halt the advance of the motor car. And if we could win the argument on a free health service in the forties, why can we not win the same argument about transport in the epoch of climate change? Similarly in relation to housing and power generation: I would pose the campaign’s demands in terms of zero carbon, which is entirely credible and easily justified to workers, with nationalisation emerging as the only means of realising that demand.

It is most important that we advance this debate not only within the left but also within the climate movement. There is far less hostility to the left than there used to be, mainly because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the pro-capitalist and libertarian greens have got no credible answers, whereas the left (including the left greens) have. So, join your local CCC group, build it within the unions and in working class communities, and engage with the debate on strategy.

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bill j

June 18, 2008 at 6:21 pm

I’m not misrepresenting Neale’s argument. He is against a class movement. Prove it if I’m wrong.
He wants a broad movement – including the church, liberals, FDR if he were alive, the trade unions etc. not a class movement.
Neale believes that the capitalist state can through this broad movement, be made to act as if it were threatened in a world war.
This is arrant nonsense.
Only the threat of its revolutionary overthrow would cause the capitalists to react on such a scale. How could they ever face such a threat if the mass movement included the church, liberals, and FDR if he were alive?
It couldn’t.
That’s why a class movement is necessary.
Based on the working class fighting for socialism.
If we were able to build a movement on such a scale – why wouldn’t we overthrow the capitalists if we were able?
Oh and by the way, the Sandinista revolution lost. Bishop Romero was shot. So was Dr King and Malcolm X.
And news flash – notwithstanding the mighty work of the civil rights movement – it did not win black emancipation.
And what’s more this attitude, broad frontism, the popular front – alliances with the radical capitalists and the church, call it whatever you want, is hardly inconsistent with other areas of the SWPs work or recent perspective is it?
Take Respect and UAF as just two other examples.
I bet you in Neale’s forthcoming book there will be nothing approaching a socialist argument in the five or so pages the SWP usually append to these things, where they pretend to present their arguments for what we should do.

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Liam

June 18, 2008 at 9:53 pm

Bill – immediately posing the issue as a choice between socialism or catastrophic climate change is not the correct approach for building a mass movement and there is a difference between building a movement and a political organisation.

The books and articles on ecosocialism that SR has produced say explicitly that the resolution of this problem in the interests of the working class and the poor globally ultimately requires that power be put in the hands of the working class and an end to capitalist relations of production. Part of that process is building movements which strengthen working class combativity and which raise anti-capitalist demands.

One of the things that made the recent demonstration at Heathrow impressive was the involvement of many hundreds of people from the area. What got them there was a very specific demand that they could relate to. If their campaign to stop the runway succeeds then BAA, a number of airlines and aircraft manufacturers will be rather poorer and we’ll have been spared thousands of tons of CO2 emissions.

Socialists – with a small number of exceptions – have come very belatedly to this subject and the conference showed that most of them still have not grasped just how important it is. What has come out this discussion is that we are only just beginning to work out what we say about actual things in the real world to real people about what our ideas are and it has to be richer and more concrete than “a movement based on the working class fighting for socialism”.

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bill j

June 18, 2008 at 10:15 pm

Well fair point, if that’s how you read my contribution. I don’t think the immediate choice is between socialism and catastrophic climate change.
But in Neale’s case, his fantasy about what the US did in the war, poses the question in just such terms.
I was simply pointing out that the only way any capitalist government would undertake such change would be under immense revolutionary pressure. Such that if it existed why not take power?
But socialism does nonetheless have something to say to the environmental movement, which in the main is split between the CCC who are liberals who want bills passed through parliament and international treaties of the capitalists to reform capitalism to make it nice.
And the direct action wing who are frustrated with the promotion of such legalistic methods, but who don’t have any concept of the social power of the working class.
Socialists should be orienting to the mass activist wing, not to tell them how to do direct action – they’re better at it than the socialists anyway – but to argue how that action can be used/fused with fighting within the working class for a social solution – i.e. socialism.
That doesn’t reject reforms. It isn’t maximalist, or catastrophistic, but it does recognise that socialism is the answer to climate change and that even if it ultimately proves unnecessary (which is at one level an unknown) the fight for socialism, combining direct action with class struggle is the best means of winning reforms in any event.
Either way the legalistic broad popular frontist method of uniting the working class, with vicars and MEPs is not the way forward.

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Adamski

June 19, 2008 at 8:48 am

Bill, I think that your interpretations of Neale’s statement on FDR and the Second World War are off beam.

As an environmental movment ,when we demand the kind of radical re-orientating of the economy and big changes that are needed to fight climate change it is evident that the ruling class and their media will present such demands as being utopian. We may even have trouble convincing our fellow workers – after years of neoliberalism – that these are realistic demands.

It is quite a good polemical point to make that advanced capitalist governments have actually been prepared to re-orientate their whole economies to what they considered a worthwhile aim – war. So why can’t our rulers accept that the economy needs to be re-orientated to achieve sustainability.

Bill seems to forget that to build a left wing mass movement to save the planet, we will actually need to have good arguments to convince workers that the kind of changes we are proposing are actually reasonable.

I agree that his 2005 formulation of how to build a mass movement on climate change has now served its usefulness, now I would argue that not taking up political questions of public transport, corporate power, free house insulation etc. is an obstacle to building the movement as these are precisely the issues which you can mobilise working class people around to fight to save the planet.

I should also note at that moment the question was also how you could build a bridge between the socialist movement who have not done nearly enough campaigning around environmental issues, and those in the environmental movement who might have lifestyle ideas, etc. but had a lot of practical knowledge around the issues. For example, in my city, we wouldn’t have any credibility if we just announced that I was forming the Climate Change movement when there were people in the city who had been campaigning on the environment for years and knew a lot more about things like renewable energy, incinerators, the science etc than certainbly I did, instead we tried to work alongside the existing environmental campaigns like Friends of the Earth, and it has been a learning curve for me. Many of these activists have a lot of detailed knowledege that I didn’t have. But at the same time, socialists had things that they were bringing to the table.

As Liam points out taking up concrete struggles – heathrow, nationalisation of the railways – and linking them to the issue of climate change & a broader critique of society is the way forward.

But in 2005, you weren’t in a situation where the Capitalist class were talking about solutions to climate change, given that they are now posing their solutions, we need to fight for our kind of solutions.

Not offering solutions now, breeds powerlessness and apathy. In my opinion, as someone who has been involved in CCC the campaign will fall apart unless it begins to fight around more concrete and class based demands.

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Roy

June 19, 2008 at 11:01 am

I was at the meeting in Manchester at which Jonathan Neale made the remark which seems to have vexed Bill so much about churches. The context was a discussion about how we could build the biggest possible mobilisation for the mass actions of the campaign. Jonathan said we should be imaginative and seek new audiences, and he suggested churchgoers as an example. Now, the church wouldn’t be my first choice when leafleting for a demo (although having said that, the only people I ever see going to a church on Sunday are working class black people, so perhaps it isn’t such a terrible idea after all.) But what Jonathan said at the meeting was hardly the same as proposing a strategic orientation to the church establishment and it isn’t really fair or constructive to portray it as such.

I think there has been an issue about watering down our demands in order to broaden the movement’s base. But things are moving on in that regard, and the most recent CCC leaflet for the 6th December is a major improvement on previous leaflets and clearly raises a set of concrete demands (no third runway, no new coal fired power stations, no to agrofuels, yes to better public transport, renewable energy and energy efficiency.) The call for an international treaty is relegated beneath these demands and is set in the context of them. Now, this is an important step forward and is to be welcomed. There is obviously a discussion to be had on exactly how the demands should be formulated and what alliances should be built to fight for them, but at least things are moving in the right direction.

Bill is wide of the mark in his characterisation of “the CCC who are liberals”. I am on the steering committee of the CCC and I am no liberal. Bill himself has participated in several internal CCC meetings. The CCC is a campaign, and one which has the potential to develop as a mass united front. Bill compounds the error by suggesting that “socialists should orient to the mass activist wing” by which he is clearly referring to the direct action wing. Direct action environmentalists usually counterpose direct action to mass action. Their most developed manifestation, Greenpeace, is notably elitist and anti-democratic. This is not to reject unity with the direct actionists – many of them are moving forward in their thinking as are most people who are engaged in the environmental struggle. But direct action is only going to be effective when it involves the masses, which at present it patently does not.

But the biggest problem with Bill’s approach is that he doesn’t understand the transitional method, the need to build a bridge between existing consciousness and where we need to be. By raising demands that workers find credible here and now we can shift the balance of class forces in our favour and yes, move towards a situation where state power is on the agenda. But this won’t happen by abstaining from the climate movement in favour of “building a movement based on the working class fighting for socialism.”

But the thing I find most distressing is this. Climate change is a wake up call, a reminder that a rationally and democratically planned socialist economy is not something that can be postponed indefinitely. Building a mass movement on climate is therefore of the utmost urgency, not only because of its objective importance but because this issue provides us with the most powerful critique of capitalism. But in order to take advantage of this opportunity the left needs to grow up, to abandon its infantile petty squabbles and sectarianism. If someone suggests building a demo among church goers it does not make them a traitor or a liberal. We do not need to waste our time denouncing each other because we belong to different groups, or because we have genuine differences on tactics. All that stuff is a distraction, and instead we should debate the way forward in an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. Indeed, as socialists we should be looking for ways of moving closer together in response to this huge crisis instead of pushing each other further apart.

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Muon

June 19, 2008 at 11:03 am

‘After all, if capitalism could switch all its energy into munitions in the second world war, then we cannot rule out an equally robust response to climate change being compatible with capitalism.’

In formal terms this is true but it is incredibly unlikely.

It took an actual shooting war with the threat of invasion (for the UK) or being squeezed out of the whole Pacific hemisphere (for the US v Japan) to make the kind of head-long production prioritisation that happened in WW2. When the Heinkels and V1s were overhead, it was easy to get centralised control of production in the industries that mattered. Climate change doesn’t exert the same immediate life or death pressure.

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PhilW

June 19, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Firstly, a couple of comments on Jonathan Neale’s article, to which there is a link above:

1) The claim in it that the IPCC’s 2001 estimates of temperature rises by 2100 are an “agreed range of guesses [that] goes from 1.4 degrees centigrade” is not right. They are calculations from real climate models and the range depends on a series of scenarios, depending on what may happen to the world economy: i.e. 1.4 if it follows a “slow growth, ecological” path, to 5.8 for business as usual (I think that is is highest scenario, but I haven’t looked at the report for a few years). This is an important difference: the calculations about what would happen for different atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are quite accurate (and actually not much different from Ahrrenius’ calculations of 1896): what is not known is how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere, as that depends on political decisions. We must give no amunition to the climate sceptics. The IPCC is basically saying to govts. “you choose”.

2) The second is about high speed trains crossing the US in a day. It is important to realise that “speed kills” as Canned Heat (appropriate name, really) were fond of saying….. not only due to accidents, but in this context, CO2 emissions too. The faster you go, the higher proportion of the energy losses are due to wind resistance, which rises with the square of the velocity. For this reason, much though we might love the Eurostar and TGV, I would not be in favour of (more) high-speed lines in the UK. There are also the questions of potential passenger capacity (spacing between trains) of high speed lines and their ripping up of vast swathes of countryside and (high carbon) housing, as the lines have to be straighter. Better to have slower trains and demand a shorter working week!

I think the claim in a comment above that the capitalists have only been putting forward their solutions since 2005 is not right. The Renewables “Obligation” on the energy companies dates from 1988, when they were also discussing buying up rainforest and of course Kyoto dates from 1997, and was first proposed at the Rio summit in 1992.

I want to come to the question of whether Roy’s suggested demands are realisable under capitalism. The first answer is that we don’t really know, as it depends how the struggle will pan out. The second answer is more complex, because there are several ways (technically) of realising these demands. It is conceivably possible for capitalism to completely rebuild its housing, transport and energy infrastructures in order to realise a zero-carbon economy (and it needs to be zero carbon: Jim Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, has just submitted a paper to Science that argues that to forestall a 2degC rise in temperature requires the CO2 level be brought DOWN to 350ppm from the current level of 385ppm). This is, if you like where the argument about WWII comes from.

There are several things that need to be borne in mind when making this analogy with WWII. Firstly, the economy is ten times larger today (40tn vs 4tn “1990 International Geary-Khamis dollars” – whatever they are) and many more countries (and sectors of the economy) need converting , so the job is a helluva lot bigger. Maybe 40 times as much conversion as was needed in WWII? Secondly, why rebuild large chunks of the capitalist infrastructure when all it’s there for is to make profits for their class? You are just making problems for yourselves doing that, as you have to have a energy (and transport, and buildings) to service that bit of redundant crap the capitalists want (e.g. the finance sector, car industry, armaments industry…)

And energy is a problem too, as most energy supplies, apart from fossil fuels and nuclear, have very low intensity (i.e. power output per amount of space they take up). They are not “environmetnally neutral”: they have their own damaging consequences, which we will have to live with. The same applies to carbon sequestration:

“Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide — a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. “Beware of the scale,” he stressed.” (NY Times 3 Feb 08).

(This is our answer to the concept of “clean coal” by the way).

So, in my opinion, capitalism MAY be able to save the planet from climate change, but its commitment to endless growth and the maitenance of redundant secotrs of the economy means that its approach would have severe environmental consequences and be extremely exploitative of workers’ labour time. Alternatively, it may go into recession and impose rationing of movement and energy on the working class.

Socialism doesn’t require the economy be as large as it is today, at least in the imperialist countries (perhaps cut it by 50-70%), but also in the main cities of the global south, where there is an awful lot of wastage and redundant sectors too. With a smaller rebuilding task, perhaps humanity can be saved from climate change.

An initial discussion of some of these issues:

The Ecological Crisis and its Consequences for Socialists

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PhilW

June 19, 2008 at 3:34 pm

Sorry about the smiley fac. Dunno how that got there. Also, the quote from Jonathan Neale should have read: “The agreed range of guesses goes from 1.4 degrees centigrade by 2100 to 5.8 degrees”.

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bill j

June 19, 2008 at 3:50 pm

I’m not sure to what extent I disagree with Roy. I’m basing my assessment of the CCC leadership on what they say and what they do and here we are talking about the small group of full timers who really decide what goes on in the CCC.
Basically, and this isn’t a secret, or anything they’re ashamed of as far as I can tell, they think orienting to political gatherings which can agree international treaties is the overriding priority.
In other words they have a consciously electoralist and reformist – in the sense of liberal reformist strategy. They want to legislate through parliament or the UN or whatever to force the capitalists to reform themselves.
If that isn’t their strategy then tell me what it is.
Hence they invite numerous do-gooder big wigs to their conferences – seven on the top table last year by my count – I’m guessing a similar number this year – with no concrete proposals about what the movement should do at all.
The mass movement is an adjunct to their lobbying.
This wing separates itself from the direct action wing – who aren’t mainly based around Greenpeace btw – but are the ones who run the climate camp, occupied the DRAX train last week etc.
While the liberal reformists sympathise with them, they do not view building a mass direct action movement as a priority, but rather seek to convince capitalist politicians to stop polluting the planet by lobbying, argument and polite conversation.
I’m not against socialists like Roy, or myself for that matter, participating in these meetings, or their activities, in fact quite the opposite, I’m for campaigning in these movements – not abstaining from them – for socialist politics. But the fact is that a socialist strategy is one quite different to that advocated by these liberal leaders.
BTW I wasn’t the one who used the word traitor in the context of liberal – I don’t believe they are traitors – traitors to what we might ask? They were never in the working class movement to begin with, but this is an accurate description of their politics – they are liberals.
(In this context perhaps I did overegg the pudding vis Jonathan Neale, but the point is, he shares essentially the same strategy of a broad liberal movement. Hence he chose the US government in WWII as his example of radical change rather than – say – the far more radical example of the Bolshevik government in 1917. No accident in my opinion and not simply a pedogogical choice. And I do find all the sucking up to the church rather irksome, if not indeed irritating.)
The fact is however, that notwithstanding Neale, I think there is a fair degree of consensus amongst the socialists here on what we need to do now. Fight within the climate change movement in the broadest sense to unify it around action in the pursuit of concrete (albeit not entirely agree yet) aims.

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Andy Newman

June 19, 2008 at 5:15 pm

It may or may not be unlikely that climate change will be tackled under capitalism;

but it is a lot more likely than us getting a worldwide socialists system in time to prevent catastrophe.

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Muon

June 19, 2008 at 5:37 pm

‘It may or may not be unlikely that climate change will be tackled under capitalism;

but it is a lot more likely than us getting a worldwide socialists system in time to prevent catastrophe.’

We’re fucked then.

By the way, you’re not supposed to release balloons. Bad for the environment cos they don’t bio-degrade and wold-life eat them. Just thought I’d drop that in. Can’t think what brought it to mind.

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bill j

June 19, 2008 at 5:45 pm

Not so.
And what’s more there’s another key difference, by fighting for socialism, i.e. building a real mass movement, rooted in the working class, which threatens the continued rule of the rich, we also stand the best chance of the capitalists listening to us.
The alternative is try to get them to behave.
History shows they won’t.

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Andy Newman

June 19, 2008 at 6:48 pm

Well this is how Roy phrased it:

“Can the capitalist class tolerate in the near future a decisive switch away from fossil fuels”

If the switch needs to be in the near future , then it has to happen under capitalism.

It would seem surrreal to think that we are going to acheive socialism “in the near future”.

therefore the campaign needs to also orient on persuading mainstream political opinion.

BTW – the issue with the second world war is not the relative size of the economy, but the political will to direct the whole economy to a shared aim, and in some cases against the interests of certains sectiosn of cpaital – and involving state direction and nationalisation if neceesary.

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Jason

June 19, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Since it is corporations razing the rainforest and screwing the aerth threatening the lives of millions and blighting the lives of billions all for the profits of a tiny elite then it seems perfectly reasonable to abolish the corporations and plan services according to human needs under democratic control and accountability.

Roy’s transitional demands e.g. free public transport under workers’ and passengers’ control- cheap carbon-free social housing under tenants’ control etc seem a good start.

These will of course be a united front for a mass campaign based on direct action to force the changes.

Will capitalists accede? Perhaps, with a gun to their head. The gun of an organised and confident working class resistance. If they don’t accede then we win more people to the idea that we can do without the elites. If they do then may be some will still have illusions in them but we have won major major concessions under our control- a control completely at loggerheads with the capitalist profit-driven system.

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Muon

June 19, 2008 at 7:02 pm

‘BTW – the issue with the second world war is not the relative size of the economy, but the political will to direct the whole economy to a shared aim, and in some cases against the interests of certains sectiosn of cpaital – and involving state direction and nationalisation if neceesary.’

I’d agree with that, but that political will was born out of the historical equivalent of having a red hot brand about to be plunged onto one’s skin ie defeat in total war. Climate change takes too long, and doesn’t concentrate the capitalist mind the way that the fall of France and Norway did for the UK.

There is of course the hope now that the rocketing price of energy will force capitalism to find some more efficient solutions, but at the cost of making the chopping down of forests to clear land to produce biofuels even more attractive..

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Jason

June 19, 2008 at 7:11 pm

Andy seems to assume that it is impossible for major social change to take place quickly enough- but actually change can be exponential and there are numerous examples of relatively sudden change in history and nature itself.

However, the idea that we can change the minds of capitalists without a mass movement is fantasy I think.

However, whatever the case we need to build the mass movements to test out who is right. So on that we can agree. Let’s get busy!

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bill j

June 19, 2008 at 7:21 pm

What it boils down to is whether socialism has anything to contribute to the struggle against climate change.
In my view certainly yes, whether or not climate change can be solved under capitalism, socialism shows how to fight hardest against the capitalists who are destroying the planet and therefore provides the best opportunity of winning reforms.
Andy Newman’s abandonment of socialism, has a practical consequence in the here and now. It means rather than fighting the capitalists we are trying to persuade them of the error of they ways.
They won’t be persuaded, because its unprofitable to do so.

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David Ellis

June 19, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Andy,

This theory that imperialism is capable of organising its forces for the good of mankind deserves further elucidation. Would you care to indulge us for the good of the debate?

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PhilW

June 19, 2008 at 7:58 pm

Bill J: “[The capitalists] won’t be persuaded, because its unprofitable to do so [i.e. deal with climate change].”

One of the reasons the capitalists have a state, apart from keeping the working class in check, is to mediate between different sectors of the capitalist class, or indeed, to act for the whole class, including against the interests of large sections of that class when the need arises. The example of the WWII IS instructive on this issue, as the state basically forced individual firms to co-operate, in order to save the class as a whole, by directing whole sectors of industry, albeit giving the capitalists a guaranteed rate of profit.

Could this happen in relation to climate change? We are now so used to seeing the state (probably just appearing to) let the bourgeoisie get on with the daily business of exploitation that it would seem unlikely today. But, I think it could happen that the climate crisis deepens to the extent that the state takes control in a manner similar to what they did in WWII. It is likely that already millions will have been killed by climate catastrophe and/or the accompanying recession, food and fossil fuel shortages etc. After all, the insurance companies have been calling for action for at least a decade and other sectors will come on board as things get worse.

It’ll probably be too little, too late, and by then our living standards will have dropped considerably and many of the world’s more exploited people will be dead. The kind of food we will have access to will be limited, our travel and gas and electricity use will be rationed. (Of course, GHG emissions will have fallen commensurate with the economic decline: viz. Cuba and Russia after 1991 – both had 30% lower emissions within a couple of years). The kinds of measures the ruling class will resort to will be extremely repressive.

How the ruling class would respond to an ecological crisis was discussed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his seminal New Left Review article “Critique of Political Ecology” in 1974. I discussed some of his ideas when I first wrote about climate change and socialism in 1989 (see link in my earlier post).

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David Ellis

June 19, 2008 at 8:15 pm

Phil, I could definitely see the capitalist state banging a few heads together to save capitalist rule in the face of climate catastrophe impacting on their patch but to fight climate change itself I don’t think so. More importantly climate change is a global phenomena and do we really see imperialism coming together to form a sort of super, homogenised, global imperialism. Perhaps a temporary bloc to blow China off the world map but that’s about all. As Lenin said, to ask the question is to answer it.

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David Ellis

June 19, 2008 at 8:18 pm

p.s. it is certainly not in the interests of insurance companies to do away with human misery. It would render them pointless.

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bill j

June 19, 2008 at 8:52 pm

Except we are not dealing with one state. The Chinese are now the largest emitters of CO2 in the world and building a new power station every two weeks.
Please don’t tell me they’re about to stop voluntarily.

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redbedhead

June 20, 2008 at 1:26 am

Some people seem to think that just by raising the most radical demands, with no reference to the actual state of working class consciousness, they will mobilize millions to overthrow capitalism and save the planet. Such a conception assumes that workers accept their lot simply by dint of repression and the lack of someone saying the right things to give them a lead. Unfortunately, workers also accept a whole load of mainstream ideas about everything from the market to racism to the environment. That basic fact has to be the starting point when considering the concrete application of tactics and slogans.
In the here and now it means finding the mechanisms to tap into the sense of concern and crisis that exists amongst broad sections of the working class. That means slogans that make sense, are “reasonable” or “credible”. It means being creative in where we go to mobilize workers – of course within the unions (and there has been recently a union conference), in the communities, in churches, wherever. And it means using popular examples to prove that the changes necessary are possible, thus the WWII example being germane and popularly accessible. (I’m afraid the Bolshevik revolution doesn’t have the same resonance as “The Good War”, like it or not.) We shouldn’t forget that one of the biggest barriers to w.c. mobilization is the confidence that change is possible.
All the best ideas and slogans on the planet mean nothing if nobody listens to them.

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Ray

June 20, 2008 at 4:54 am

If there is an ecological catastrophe then it won’t just be up to the capitalist class to address this. As with an economic crisis, in an ecological crisis workers will play a central role and it’s up to us as socialists to encourage workers to get rid of the ruling class who are the cause of the crisis.

The US government has drastically cut it’s funding for the development of alternative fuels over the last 15 years. The UK carbon emissions continue to grow despite spin from Labour. The West is doing very little to challenge climate change because it has handed over large parts of the energy infrastructure to private finance capitalists who are unregulated, decentralised and only interested in profit.

At the moment, the capitalist market offers no solution – only more environmental damage. The major oil companies have absolutely no commitment to reducing carbon emissions and are cutting the tokenistic funding they have offered for so-called “green” energy development.

The problem isn’t the development of new cleaner forms of energy. This technology has been around for decades. It’s the greed of the ruling class that exploits oil wealth and creates the consumer society that is built upon it. Only a drastic change in behaviour will alter this and that will either come about in a positive manner through workers taking control of society or through the devastation of society through climate change and other ecological disasters.

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PhilW

June 20, 2008 at 8:15 am

I’m just arguing that it is possible the capitalist class could respond in the way I outlined, not even that it is the most likely. I agree that the degree of international co-oridination required makes it look unlikely, but perhaps it will involve threats and sanctions to uncooperative states etc.

I also included the issue of fossil fuel shortages (in particular) as a possible motivating factor. Some large restructuring of the energy industry is inevitable in the next 50 years (the large plans for nuclear power being bandied about are a case in point). As I said before, it will be too little, too late, in terms of controlling CO2 emissions. (In fact, it already is: the science was known in the 19th century, Arrhenius quantified it, and systematic rises in CO2 levels were first recorded in Hawaii in the 1950’s. In 1965, a US presidential commission noted the problems that would be observed due to climate change, but by 1989, significant alterations in glaciers and tundra had already been noted).

David Strahan (money programme reporter and author of “The Last Oil Shock” reckons the anti-climate change movement hasn’t properly grasped the significance of “peak oil” (and gas) and I tend to agree.

On insurance companies: eventually their premiums become so high that people stop paying. As far as I know, nuclear power stations cannot be insured privately. The same happens to individuals (areas of high crime, flood plains etc.) Insurance companies do not operate in areas of the highest misery: they require an “intermediate” level of misery, if you like. See this report from 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4100049.stm which has the following quote in it:

‘ Thomas Loster, a climate expert with Munich Re said: “As in 2002 and 2003, the overall balance of natural catastrophes is again clearly dominated by weather-related disasters, many of them exceptional and extreme.

“We need to stop this dangerous experiment humankind is conducting on the Earth’s atmosphere.” ‘

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PhilW

June 20, 2008 at 8:31 am

…. and I’m not arguing I actually want imperialism to respond in a co-oridnated way to “fight” climate change, as Dave Ellis seems to suggest I am. In fact, I’m totally with him on this: I’m arguing that imperialism’s “solutions” – were they to be pursued – are no good for the following reasons, amongst others:

1) They will be inadequate
2) They will be environmentally damaging in different ways to CO2 emissions
3) They will involve super-exploitation of the working class, as grandiose alternative energy projects are pursued (viz. Athabasca Tar Sands) – but also renewable ones – “solar in the desert”, for example.
4) The will probably involve increased inter-state conflict, including war
5) They will include restrictions on the right of the working class to travel and energy (massive green taxes, tradable carbon rations etc)

That is why it is important to have a mass movement against climate change and its manifestations. Although such a movement would point to the need for socialist revolution, of course that may well not happen in time. In that case, all that can be hoped for is that we are able to keep imperialism’s most reactionary responses in check, while still building for the socialist revolution.

(I should add that a post-revolutionary society wouldn’t exactly find breaking from the carbon economy a bed of roses either).

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Roy

June 20, 2008 at 9:46 am

Andy Newman: “If the switch needs to be in the near future , then it has to happen under capitalism. It would seem surrreal to think that we are going to acheive socialism ‘in the near future.’

Whether it seems surreal or not, that is what has got to happen, otherwise we really are “fucked” as Muon so eloquently put it. Above all we have to understand the notion of ‘tipping points’. Beyond a certain level of warming, the planet itself, entirely independently of human activity, will begin to emit vast quantities of CO2 and methane (a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2). A vicious circle then ensues which we are entirely powerless to prevent, even if we were to reduce all human emissions to zero. But the worst effects will not be apparent until after the tipping points have been breached. This is why the capitalist class is the class which is least likely to respond in time. The corporations and the state are accountable to a class of people who lead an idyllic lifestyle, who feel safely cocooned from material reality, and who are probably more alienated from nature than any humans in history. And the form of that accountability is reducible to one simple variable: the rate of profit.

The world has millions of climate refugees already. If we breach the tipping points that will turn into billions. It is at this point that the capitalist states will initiate a decisive response, and as Phil says, that response will be wholly repressive (a fortress world). Beyond that, humanity’s decline will be permanent and most probably terminal. As part of this process, capitalism will at some stage be superceded by some hitherto unknown form of barbarism.

But what did we expect? That the continued ecocidal tyranny of capitalist rule would allow for an indefinite postponement of the stark choice between socialism or barbarism? It will not. So yes Andy, we need to achieve socialism in the near future, because the near future is all we’ve got.

This doesn’t mean that we should panic and slip into ultraleft maximalist posturing. That would be as useless as doing nothing. We still need a transitional approach in order to build bridges from existing levels of class consciousness to revolutionary class consciousness. But we have to do so with a sense of urgency, and with due regard to material reality. It is physical reality that we need to be realistic about, not some preconceived notion of how fixed capitalist social relations are, or how slow-changing human consciousness is. Consciousness can change very rapidly, and our class is far more intelligent than theirs. So I remain optimistic that we can resolve this crisis. But we are cutting it a bit fine and we do need to get our act together soon.

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PhilW

June 20, 2008 at 9:55 am

…. and another restriction on the working class, particularly women: the right to control their own bodies. See: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/

who are very explicit about the supposed links between climate change and population, which they then extend to immigration too.

Look at the sponsors and board members, to see who supports this reactionary guff.

“I “debated” with someone from the OPT at the climate change conference last week. Of course, from the way the workshop was billed, and possibly the fact that my account of what I was going to say was left off the workshop programme, the workshop participants might be expected to be self-selected as more positively disposed to population control. A couple of people may have been interested but not strongly committed, and these were the type of person I wanted to address, but the overwhelming majority were already strong pop. controllers, including Mayer Hillman, author of “How we can Save the Planet” and two people who introduced themselves as members of the Green Party (presumably, they were a bit off-line).

I was truly shocked at the inability of the pop controllers to even acknowledge and address the arguments against population control. Basically, they had no concept of women’s rights, working class exploitation or racism. I should add that I may have been incoherent in my arguments: after all such interactions are never wholly one-sided.

A bit facetiously, I pointed out as an example of capitalist “waste” the production of the MP3player/taser combo, which – from its design – is aimed at middle class jogging middle-aged women (without being too stereotypical).

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://img.metro.co.uk/i/pix/2008/01/taserR_450x250.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html%3Fin_article_id%3D82876%26in_page_id%3D2%26expand%3Dtrue&h=250&w=450&sz=118&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=XS_E3XB7RI-sBM:&tbnh=71&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dtazer%2Bmp3%2Bplayer%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1B3GGGL_en___GB267%26sa%3DN

(If that huge link doesn’t work, just put tazer mp3 player into google images).

I pointed out that, actually, as a piece of marketing, it was aimed totally in the wrong direction. The real victims of street crime are, after all, young men, so the designs should really have tags, manga and what-have-you (without being too stereotypical), not leopard skin. Many of the workshop participants didn’t seem to get this, either.

4 days later (this Weds), my son and about 4 of his college mates were attacked in the street and robbed of their mobiles and iPods. Perhaps Apple are missing a trick……

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Jason

June 20, 2008 at 2:35 pm

Good points and just as there are tipping points in nature there are tipping points in politics as well. So actually if we get our politics and act together we do have a chance.

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bill j

June 20, 2008 at 3:29 pm

Who thinks we should raise demands without referring to working class consciousness?
No one on here so far from what I can tell.
The point is whether working class consciousness is the starting point or the end point for the demands that you raise.
Neale notes that working class consciousness is weak and therefore abandons working class demands and working class examples.
His politics are indistinguishable from the liberal wing of the climate change movement. Its why he’s so readily invited to speak all the time.
As Lenin pointed out years ago the spontaneous consciousness of society is bourgeois. It is limited to the reform of the existing order. Hence if consciousness determines everything you say – inevitably – and it really is inevitable – what you say will be bourgeois. In the sense of limited to proposing the reform of the capitalist system.
Why does that matter in a period when the overthrow of capitalism is not posed as a task of the moment?
Because how you fight, what you do, the methods of struggle you advocate, the orientation of your campaign are related to the final goal that you fight for.
If you limit yourself to the reform of the capitalist system, inevitably you limit your campaigning methods to reformist ones.
If rather you struggle to overthrow the system – not I repeat that this is an immediate prospect – you struggle so that the struggles of today lead on to the final goal.
In other words you fight harder. You orient to the working class. You fight to show how the struggle of today is related to the capitalist system and poses the necessity of its overthrow.
Neale does none of those things – as I’m sure will be demonstrated by his forthcoming book.
Ultimately its not necessary to know in advance whether the overthrow of capitalism is necessary to solve climate change. It is enough to know that capitalism is the cause of climate change and we cannot trust the capitalists to solve it.
We then need to pedagogically sure, relate what we’re doing now to the struggle for socialism.

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redbedhead

June 21, 2008 at 2:06 am

billj wrote: “The point is whether working class consciousness is the starting point or the end point for the demands that you raise.”

This is your first mistake that relates to all the others. It is neither – the demands you raise are part of the process of raising consciousness. They must be one step ahead of where workers consciousness is at, not ten or twenty. Of course this is an art and nobody gets it right all the time but you view these things like a stopped clock.

“[Neale’s] politics are indistinguishable from the liberal wing of the climate change movement. Its why he’s so readily invited to speak all the time.”

You know, you sound like the unpopular kid in school who thinks that other are popular just because they’re jerks and everybody is stupid. Neale has done the work and has built up credibility for himself by not doing what you’re doing – being an insulting a-hole about the hard work of other people in the movement.

“You orient to the working class.”
Uh, CCC trade union conference anyone?

“You fight to show how the struggle of today is related to the capitalist system and poses the necessity of its overthrow.”

By raising slogans that nobody follows except for the ten people who agree with your belief in the need to arm the workers to seize the petroleum refineries? The point is to mobilize workers to raise their levels of organization and confidence on the issue and thereby open them to the broader arguments. You only do that by starting from where people are at and then providing them with ways to mobilize to pressure for the implementation of that perspective. As Trotsky said, the working class learns by a series of progressive approximations.

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Jason

June 21, 2008 at 8:42 am

redbedhead- I think you are perhaps viewing things in a cliched way (as well as degenerating into insult at times).

The working class may learn by a series of progressive aproximations- indeed you could make an argument that anyone learns like this.

But it is wrong and patronising to say that demands for free public transport under public democratic control are ten times beyond what workers are arguing for – it may be beyond the immediate horozon of today’s struggles in many places but it is one connected to the daily experience of millions of working class people.

It is these sort of demands Roy, Bill, myslef and others are arguing for yet you make up demands no one argued for and refuse to engage seemingly with any practical steps to build a mass movement.

That of course is your right but it’s hard to see if you’ll get anywhere by being purely negative. Instead we should take up the demands for social carbon free housing housing, public transport, cheap environmentlaly sustainable fuel all under working clas sdemocratic control and start to build a movement.

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bill j

June 21, 2008 at 9:26 am

Where did Trotsky say that?

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Roy

June 21, 2008 at 6:05 pm

One of the biggest barriers to building a mass movement on climate, and this applies particularly in Britain and Germany, is that our governments are highly adept at greenwash. Today’s Guardian boldly announces on its front page the coming of a government initiated ‘Green Revolution’. However, it transpires that this ‘revolution’ amounts to no more than a half hearted attempt to meet the EU target of 15% of energy to be generated by renewables by 2020. What’s more, all of these measures rely on subsidising the private sector to deliver the goods. We are encouraged to think that this is the maximum realistically achievable. The fact that it is wholly inadequate as a response to climate change doesn’t enter the equation.

If we try too hard to be ‘reasonable’ by restricting our demands to those that might be considered ‘realistic’, people will think that the issue can’t be all that serious after all, and in any case, why bother protesting because the government is dealing with the matter anyway!

First and foremost we have to be honest about the scale of changes that are needed and the urgency of the crisis. No one will fight for anything unless they are convinced of two things: is it worth fighting for, and can we win. The confidence that we can win will emerge as the movement grows (and as the balance of class forces starts to shift in our favour) provided we can convince enough people that the changes we want to achieve are capable of resolving the crisis while also delivering real and tangible improvements to our lives.

15% renewables by 2020 may be ‘realistic’ but it isn’t going to resolve this crisis, nor will it inspire anyone to fight. Zero carbon by 2020 is also realistic (technically and scientifically, which is the only realism that matters), but has the advantage that it is also a credible solution to the crisis and therefore a source of inspiration to those who would want to fight for human survival.

Similarly, ‘affordable’ public transport (or even ‘cheap’ public transport) is vague and uninspiring (and what is affordable to one person may be totally unaffordable to someone who is struggling to put food on the table) whereas free public transport would deliver real gains both in terms of carbon emissions and the quality of our lives. Anyone who thinks this is ‘unrealistic’ should take a close look at the example of Hasselt, which Adamski referred to in an earlier comment. Bus passenger numbers rose from 360 000 to 4 615 000 between 1996 and 2006, the city centre was made pedestrian and cyclist friendly, and there are other tangible benefits in terms of levels of social interaction. See http://www.freepublictransport.org/index.php/free-public-transport-in-action

There are no short cuts to building a mass movement on climate. However credible or inspiring our demands, we still need to organize together to win the arguments in the unions, workplaces, schools, colleges and communities. And as socialists we also need to convince our own comrades to take this issue seriously and to actively engage with it, otherwise the perception that the environment is a middle class liberal issue will never change.

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Jason

June 22, 2008 at 7:01 am

Good points. I think we should prioritise building the movement through two or three key demands- free public transport, free insulation for all houses, may be an immediate end to the destruction of rainforests.

How we get there is harder but I was discussing with friends yesterday at music festival and some ideas came up:

Blockade petrol stations and demos to stop traffic on roads with the demand for free public transport.

Rent and mortgage strike until demands on energy conservation, home improvements and insulation are met.

Taking goods from rainforest out of shops whether mahogany chests or palm oil and saying we are reclaiming stolen goods.

Ok may be just some wild ideas from revellers at a party but if we can get some imagination and some passion may be we can begin to create a movement.

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David Ellis

June 24, 2008 at 5:46 pm

The way to do it is to understand what is necessary which is not given by politics but by science. If you don’t tell the working class what is necessary then you are simply lying to them.

Then we have to decide how to achieve what is necessary and what are the obstacles to achieving it.

Scientists have told us what is necessary. A huge per centage cut in global carbon emissions in the very near future. Bourgeois politicians lie about what is needed to achieve these cuts and how serious the obstacles to achieving them are.

Commuting in the form and level we have today for instance cannot continue. It will have to end if we are to have any chance of lowering emmissions. There is no point telling anybody any different. Late capitalism and commuting are completely interdependent. That doesn’t mean we simply say `socialism’ but we must come up with a programme of workers control of planning and impose certain restrictions on industry vis its responsibility to make it possible for workers to live where they work. Capitalist industry doesn’t care and never will because of the anarchy inherent in the `market’ and competition. Without working class and community geared planning any talk of combatting climate change is so much hot air.

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Liam

April 24, 2009 at 11:18 pm

A challenge to many of these views is offered from an Ulster Scots perspective by Professor Billy McWilliams with some boffinish graphs to prove his point.

He is pretty persuasive.

http://1690andallthat.blogspot.com/2009/04/climatic-changin-confrence.html

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