Burnt

Fighting for Climate Justice

Chris Saltmarsh

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786808509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política medioambiental y energética

'An inspiring rallying cry for activists everywhere to work together to build a just, ecosocialist future' - Grace Blakeley

Time is up. The climate crisis is no longer a future to be feared, but a devastating reality. We see it in the wildfires in California and floods across Britain - the 'once in a generation' extreme weather events that now happen every year.

In a world where those in charge are constantly letting us down, real change in our lifetime means taking power into our own hands. The task ahead of us is daunting, but the emergence of a new wave of movements focused on climate justice, equality and solidarity also brings hope.

Asking how we have arrived at this moment, Chris Saltmarsh argues that the profoundly political nature of the environmental crisis has been relentlessly downplayed. After all, how can solar panels save us while capitalism places profit over the future of the planet? Analysing the failures of NGOs, the limitations of Extinction Rebellion and Youth Strikes, the role of trade unions, and the possibilities of a Green New Deal, Burnt issues a powerful call for a radical collective movement: saving the world is not enough; we must build a better one in the process.

Chapter 1

The c-word (capitalism)

The idea that humans are collectively responsible for our climate and wider ecological crises is a popular one. In the trailer for his 2020 Netflix blockbuster, A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough proclaims: ‘The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. Yet, the way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline. Human beings have overrun the world.’ In backlash to well-funded climate denial, a human-centred climate terminology has come to dominate. Climate change is ‘man-made’, emissions are ‘anthropogenic’, our new geological epoch is the ‘Anthropocene’. But neither obstructive climate change denial nor the crude homogenisation of humanity as an equally responsible collective agent are helpful frameworks. The root cause of climate change is in our system of organising the economy and our relationship to nature: capitalism.

The concept of the Anthropocene gained prominence in the 2000s. Its story is simple. We are living in a new geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet. Agriculture, industry, fossil fuel extraction and deforestation: these are core to the development of human civilisation. They have led to mass extinction, pollution, biodiversity collapse and climate change. In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore problematises this narrative, arguing that it excludes considerations of class, capitalism, imperialism and culture as potential driving forces behind those ecological crises. The Anthropocene narrative ‘does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.’¹ Moore is saying that our economy has inequality and injustice so deeply ingrained that we cannot claim that the impoverished, displaced, exploited and terrorised are as responsible for climate change as those who govern and profit from this system. Are the Indigenous peoples resisting new oil pipelines as culpable as the companies and governments using military violence to force them through? Are subsistence farmers as blameworthy as multinational agri-businesses forcing farmers into debt and spreading industrial agriculture? Moore proposes an alternative name for our geological epoch: Capitalocene. We shouldn’t get hung up on terminology, but Moore’s intervention highlights that the Anthropocene is not just a scientific claim. It’s an ideological story implicating those with no part in making the crisis as much as capitalists who continue to profit from climate injustice, and the capitalist system they operate through.

The enemy is profit

In the most general terms, capital is money used to generate more money. Capitalism gets its name from the centrality of the accumulation of capital to the system. A capitalist (an individual or corporation) buys someone else’s time to work for them. The capitalist then buys the materials, machinery and computers, and puts these to work to produce some commodity (such as, pasta, video games, solar panels or apartment buildings). The commodity is then sold for more money than was originally invested – this is profit (surplus value, in Marxist terms). The surplus value comes from what Marxists call the exploitation of labour. The capitalist pays the worker less than the value of what they have produced, so the capitalist can steal some for themselves. The profit is then reinvested to create more profits, and the cycle of capital accumulation continues. Capitalism structures the economy so that this process governs all activity. Any other considerations – justice, climate stability or human rights – are subordinated to the capital’s accumulation. That’s not to say those other interests are entirely ignored, but according to capitalist logic, maximising profit is the primary motive.

Capitalist ideology says that this process of accumulation is how society progresses. Capital creates wealth, which ‘trickles down’. It is shared by everyone as it’s distributed to workers through wages, taxed by the government and reinvested by capitalists into socially useful things. This rosy story isn’t quite the reality, though. The profit motive usually gets in the way. To maximise returns, capitalists suppress workers’ wages and invest in making the most profitable commodities, rather than what is socially needed. Capital constantly innovates new methods of tax avoidance through offshore accounts, legal loopholes and philanthropy. There’s no point at which capitalists are satisfied with their wealth. There’s no point at which profit can be subordinated to decarbonisation, restoring ecosystems, investing in public infrastructure or adapting to climate change. When capital is left to its own devices, there will always be a trade-off between profits and climate justice, and profit will always win out. Sometimes capital is restrained by the state when it does things that hurt capital collectively. We see this with minimum labour standards and basic environmental regulations, for example around the disposal of hazardous waste. These are generally the result of hard-fought organising by workers and activists.

As well as the capital accumulation of exploiting workers’ labour, Moore explains the importance of what he calls ‘appropriation’. This is the unpaid extraction of value from: labour (for example, unpaid housework), food, energy and raw materials.² The appropriation of these natures is necessary to maximise profits by keeping production costs down. Central to capital accumulation, then, is the process of commodifying nature: turning natures into things to be bought, sold or used for production. Rare earth minerals, oceans, rainforests, fertile land and untapped fossil fuels don’t have some essential monetary value. Value is imposed as capital expands its sphere of accumulation and workers transform natures into commodities, then sold for profit. Capitalism facilitates capital’s insatiable drive for profit, resulting in rainforests cleared to sell the wood and expand agricultural space; oceans trawled for fish populations; mines created to extract minerals; and fossil fuels extracted to be burned for energy. Mainstream economists call these side effects ‘negative externalities’, but they are much more than the unfortunate costs of an otherwise efficient system. These appropriations have driven us into existential ecological crises, including climate change.

Although some debates present a conflict of interests between workers and environment, workers and environment are in fact united by their centrality to the process of capital accumulation. The exploitation of human labour and appropriation of nature mutually allow capital to profit from its investments. With neither in the popular interest, the need for wage labour and the commodification of nature to be invented and then violently imposed by capital is another case of unity. David Harvey describes how the law was used to standardise the wage relation, the length of the working day and to criminalise beggars and vagabonds.³ Under early-capitalism, peasants were expelled from their land to force them into urban areas so that they could be exploited as workers, simultaneously making way for their land to be appropriated by capital. Methods of imposing this system on workers and nature have evolved over time, including through: ‘enclosures, punitive rent hikes, land clearings, the introduction of agricultural machinery, crushing competition from agribusiness, military confiscations, bans on inheritance of small plots or some other blow that makes continued life on the land impossible.’⁴ The profit motive has driven capital to intensify the exploitation of labour, forcing workers into worse conditions, and the unsustainable commodification of nature in the extraction of fossil fuels, hurtling the climate past irreversible tipping points. Workers and those vulnerable to climate injustices share an interest in transforming the economy so that human well-being, justice and a stable climate are prioritised over capital’s profits.

Capitalism’s endurance

The by-products of an economy oriented around profit are plain for all to see: abhorrent working conditions, poverty, grotesque inequality and ecosystem collapse. All of this to the backdrop of intensifying climate change that is already destroying communities, displacing people from their homes, ruining livelihoods and killing innocent people. Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism accounts for the strength of ideology in making capitalism common sense despite all this. Inspired by the slogan ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’, Fisher defines capitalist realism as: ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative.’⁵ Fisher notes that climate crisis and environmentalist critiques offer the strongest rebuttal to capitalist realism: ‘far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment.’⁶ How does capitalism neutralise this seemingly irrefutable challenge to its ideological foundations? While hard-line conservatives are distracted by conspiratorial climate change denial funded by the fossil fuel industry, capital placates everyone else by incorporating ecological and climate concern into its own culture and marketing.

In a classic example, Fisher describes the environmentalism of the Disney/Pixar movie Wall-E (2008). The world is overcome by waste due to consumerism. Human civilisation migrates to spaceships, where overconsumption gets even worse, while robots clean Earth. Eventually humanity returns to Earth and rediscovers the joys of abundant planetary living under the same corporate regime responsible for the original crisis. My Dad took me and my brother to see the film when it came out. On the way out he asked us what we thought the message was. As long as he could hold our pre-adolescent attention, we briefly discussed the themes of waste and overconsumption. Years later, upon reading Fisher’s discussion of the film, I gained a new understanding of the function of Wall-E. Fisher argues: ‘the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.’⁷ The idea is that having spent an hour and forty minutes watching a film about consumerism and environmental collapse, we can feel righteous about our critical understanding of the imperfections of our system without actually doing anything to change it. Capitalist popular culture is not denying the system’s internal problems (indeed, it profits from satirising them). It just denies that an alternative system is possible or desirable.

Popular concern for climate change is co-opted by corporations into their marketing and public relations campaigns. From 2020, meat substitute company Quorn put climate change at the centre of advertising campaigns. One ad said: ‘We care about the world around us more than ever and we love our food. So Quorn Crispy Nuggets are a step in the right direction because they help us reduce our carbon footprint and they taste amazing.’ Another advert is a YouTube collaboration with corporate partner Liverpool Football Club. Players Xherdan Shaqiri, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Jordan Henderson awkwardly laugh through their corporate obligation obviously uncomfortable with the fact that none of them are close to being vegetarian. Henderson brings some respectability to proceedings with a dignified remark: ‘To have everything in moderation, that’s the best way.’ Companies like Quorn don’t have much interest in transforming the food system to eliminate workers’ rights abuses, environmental degradation and emissions. For this corporation, individuals ‘reducing their carbon footprint’ and practicing moderation is conveniently synonymous with buying their product.

The first time I encountered the climate justice marketing of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was in November 2015. I’d just arrived in Paris for the annual youth climate conference preceding the UN climate summit. On the wall of a Metro station was a large Ben & Jerry’s poster comparing their ice cream to the planet: ‘Quand c’est foundu, c’est foutu!’ (When it’s melted, it’s fucked!), also promoting the climate march organised for the day before the summit. My first impression was of the hypocrisy of a dairy company advertising its support for climate justice while profiting from emissions-intensive animal agriculture. I later learned that although Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are progressive activists, including funding Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for President and campaigning to reduce corporate influence in politics, the company was bought by multi-national conglomerate Unilever in 2000. Supporting climate justice, migrants’ rights, or Black Lives Matter is a just a brand for this subsidiary of Unilever. For consumers, buying Ben & Jerry’s is a satisfying expression of progressive values, as if they’re making some difference to the climate crisis. Unilever enhances the environmentalist reputation of its subsidiary and, most importantly, sells more products to make a profit. Capital is driven to turn everything into a commodity, including anti-capitalism.

Capitalism’s evolution into its neoliberal stage was driven by the aims of consolidating capital’s power over labour and securing new markets to profit from. Neoliberalism’s headline ideological promise was reducing governmental interference in the economy. Actually existing neoliberalism has instead redirected state power towards imposing and upholding deregulation, privatisation, de-politicisation and austerity. These reforms began in the 1970s and 1980s amid a crisis of high inflation and high unemployment beginning with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, and the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the UK and US. Another wave of reforms came under the guise of austerity after the 2008 financial crisis. Neoliberalism has emerged roughly in parallel to the intensification of climate crisis. Some think of this as an unfortunate accident of history, cruelly impeding our attempts to decarbonise (the effort to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions across the economy), but neoliberalism was designed and (with the full force of the state) imposed to inject a few more decades of profitable life into capitalism as it faced existential crises of its own making. Neoliberalism is not the root cause of climate injustice, but its reforms have facilitated capital’s continued profiting from it.

Deregulation has meant stripping away any constraints on capital’s right to profit, most significantly for the climate, including fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them to discover and extract fossil fuels. The privatisation of public assets has handed key sectors of industry to capital. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major privatised large sections of the economy by selling state-owned utilities to private investors. This included Jaguar, British Telecom, British Aerospace, Britoil, British Gas, British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, British Coal and British Rail. What is striking about this list of transport, manufacturing and energy companies, is the role they might have played in a government-led energy transition had they not been stripped of democratic public control. With deregulation and privatisation comes de-politicisation. There’s no need for democratic politics to interfere with the ‘free market’ as it maximises profits and neglects all else. With industrial strategy abandoned and finance capital supreme, the failure to decarbonise makes clear that whether capital or governments are in charge, the economy is political and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Climate crisis
• 1. The c-word (capitalism)
• 2. Justice or bust
• 3. Climate Action, Ltd
• 4. The next generation
• 5. Green New Deal – a blueprint
• 6. Jobs, jobs, jobs
• 7. The s-word (state power)
• 8. Don’t let crises go to waste
• Conclusion: Don’t mourn, organise!
• Resources