John
Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark: Why Naomi Klein’s inspiring book
frightens capitalism’s liberal defenders, making them desperate to blunt
and undermine its message.
John Bellamy Foster is editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review (subscription
highly recommended!) and professor of sociology at the University of
Oregon. Brett Clark is associate professor of sociology at the
University of Utah and co-author of The Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).
CROSSING THE RIVER OF FIRE
The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything
by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
(Republished, with permission, from Monthly Review, February 2015)
The front cover of Naomi Klein’s new book,
This Changes Everything, is designed to look like a protest sign. It consists of the title alone in big block letters, with the emphasis on
Changes.
Both the author’s name and the subtitle are absent. It is only when we
look at the spine of the book, turn it over, or open it to the title
page that we see it is written by North America’s leading left climate
intellectual-activist and that the subtitle is
Capitalism vs. the Climate.[1] All of which is clearly meant to convey in no uncertain terms that climate change literally
changes everything
for today’s society. It threatens to turn the mythical human conquest
of nature on its head, endangering present-day civilization and throwing
doubt on the long-term survival of
Homo sapiens.
The source of this closing circle is not the planet, which operates
according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in
which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount.
It is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the
earth as a place of human habitation. Hence, the change that Klein is
most concerned with, and to which her book points, is not climate change
itself, but the radical social transformation that must be carried out
in order to combat it. We as a species will either radically change the
material conditions of our existence or they will be changed far more
drastically for us. Klein argues in effect for System Change Not Climate
Change—the name adopted by the current ecosocialist movement in the
United States.[2]
In this way Klein, who in
No Logo ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in
The Shock Doctrine
established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic
of neoliberal disaster capitalism, signals that she has now, in William
Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a
critic of capital as a system.[3] The reason is climate change,
including the fact that we have waited too long to address it, and the
reality that nothing short of an ecological revolution will now do the
job.
In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on
ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is
no longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with
human survival over the long run. We need therefore to reconstruct
society along lines that go against the endless amassing of wealth as
the primary goal. Society must be rebuilt on the basis of other
principles, including the “regeneration” of life itself and what she
calls “ferocious love.”[4] This reversal in the existing social
relations of production must begin immediately with a war on the
fossil-fuel industry and the economic growth imperative—when such growth
means more carbon emissions, more inequality, and more alienation of
our humanity.
Klein’s crossing of the river of fire has led to a host of liberal attacks on
This Changes Everything,
often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These
establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are
disingenuous, having little to do with serious confrontation with her
analysis. Rather, their primary purpose is to rein in her ideas,
bringing them into conformity with received opinion. If that should
prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the
conversation. However, her message represents the growing consciousness
of the need for epochal change, and as such is not easily suppressed.
The global climateric
The core argument of
This Changes Everything is a historical
one. If climate change had been addressed seriously in the 1960s, when
scientists first raised the issue in a major way, or even in the late
1980s and early ’90s, when James Hansen gave his famous testimony in
Congress on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change was first established, and the Kyoto Protocol introduced, the
problem could conceivably have been addressed without a complete shakeup
of the system. At that historical moment, Klein suggests, it would
still have been possible to cut emissions by at most 2 percent a
year.[5]
Today such incremental solutions are no longer conceivable even in
theory. The numbers are clear. Over 586 billion metric tons of carbon
have been emitted into the atmosphere. To avoid a 2°C (3.6°F) increase
in global average temperature—the edge of the cliff for the climate—it
is necessary to stay below a trillion metric tons in cumulative carbon
emissions. At the present rate of carbon emissions it is estimated that
we will arrive at the one trillionth metric ton—equivalent to the 2°C
mark—in less than a quarter century, around 2039.[6] Once this point is
reached, scientists fear that there is a high probability that feedback
mechanisms will come into play with reverberations so great that we will
no longer be able to control where the thermometer stops in the end. If
the world as it exists today is still to avoid the 2°C increase—and the
more dangerous 4°C, the point at which disruption to life on the planet
will be so great that civilization may no longer be possible—real
revolutionary ecological change, unleashing the full power of an
organized and rebellious humanity, is required.
What is necessary first and foremost is the cessation of fossil-fuel
combustion, bringing to a rapid end the energy regime that has dominated
since the Industrial Revolution. Simple arithmetic tells us that there
is no way to get down to the necessary zero emissions level, i.e., the
complete cessation of fossil-fuel combustion, in the next few decades
without implementing some kind of planned moratorium on economic growth,
requiring shrinking capital formation and reduced consumption in the
richest countries of the world system. We have no choice but to slam on
the brakes and come to a dead stop with respect to carbon emissions
before we go over the climate cliff. Never before in human history has
civilization faced so daunting a challenge.
Klein draws here on the argument of Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change in Britain, who indicates that rich countries
will need to cut carbon emissions by 8–10 percent a year. “Our ongoing
and collective carbon profligacy,” Anderson writes, “has squandered any
opportunity for ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and
larger) 2°C budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the
remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and
economic hegemony.”[7]
Instead of addressing climate change when it first became critical in
the 1990s, the world turned to the intensification of neoliberal
globalization, notably through the creation of the World Trade
Organization. It was the very success of the neoliberal campaign to
remove most constraints on the operations of capitalism, and the
negative effect that this had on all attempts to address the climate
problem, Klein contends, that has made “revolutionary levels of
transformation” of the system the only real hope in avoiding “climate
chaos.”[8] “As a result,” she explains,
“we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slightly
ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly
when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things that we must do to
avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the
particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s.
They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart
of our economic model: grow or die….
“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including
human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in
humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid
collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be
changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….
“Because of our lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is
it possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the
fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.”[9]
Of course, “the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism” is simply a roundabout way of pointing to
the fundamental logic of capitalism itself,
its underlying drive toward capital accumulation, which is hardly
constrained at all in its accumulation function even in the case of a
strong regulatory environment. Instead, the state in a capitalist
society generally seeks to free up opportunities for capital
accumulation on behalf of the system as a whole, rationalizing market
relations so as to achieve greater overall, long-run expansion. As Paul
Sweezy noted nearly three-quarters of a century ago in
The Theory of Capitalist Development,
“Speaking historically, control over capitalist accumulation has never
for a moment been regarded as a concern of the state; economic
legislation has rather had the aim of blunting class antagonisms, so
that accumulation, the normal aim of capitalist behavior, could go
forward smoothly and uninterruptedly.”[10]
To be sure, Klein herself occasionally seems to lose sight of this
basic fact, defining capitalism at one point as “consumption for
consumption’s sake,” thus failing to perceive the Galbraith dependence
effect, whereby the conditions under which we consume are structurally
determined by the conditions under which we produce.[11] Nevertheless,
the recognition that capital accumulation or the drive for economic
growth is the defining property, not a mere attribute, of the system
underlies her entire argument. Recognition of this systemic property led
the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter to declare:
“Stationary capitalism would be a
contradictio in adjecto.”[12]
It follows that no mere technological wizardry—of the kind
ideologically promoted, for example, by the Breakthrough Institute—will
prevent us from breaking the carbon budget within several decades, as
long as the driving force of the reigning socioeconomic system is its
own self-expansion. Mere improvements in carbon efficiency are too small
as long as the scale of production is increasing, which has the effect
of expanding the absolute level of carbon dioxide emitted. The
inevitable conclusion is that we must rapidly reorganize society on
other principles than that of stoking the engine of capital with fossil
fuels.
None of this, Klein assures us, is cause for despair. Rather,
confronting this harsh reality head on allows us to define the strategic
context in which the struggle to prevent climate change must be fought.
It is not primarily a technological problem unless one is trying to
square the circle: seeking to reconcile expanding capital accumulation
with the preservation of the climate. In fact, all sorts of practical
solutions to climate change exist at present and are consistent with the
enhancement of individual well-being and growth of human community. We
can begin immediately to implement the necessary changes such as:
democratic planning at all levels of society; introduction of
sustainable energy technology; heightened public transportation;
reductions in economic and ecological waste; a slowdown in the treadmill
of production; redistribution of wealth and power; and above all an
emphasis on sustainable human development.[13]
There are ample historical precedents. We could have a crash program,
as in wartime, where populations sacrificed for the common good. In
England during the Second World War, Klein observes, driving automobiles
virtually ceased. In the United States, the automobile industry was
converted in the space of half a year from producing cars to
manufacturing trucks, tanks, and planes for the war machine. The
necessary rationing—since the price system recognizes nothing but
money—can be carried out in an egalitarian manner. Indeed, the purpose
of rationing is always to share the sacrifices that have to be made when
resources are constrained, and thus it can create a sense of real
community, of all being in this together, in responding to a genuine
emergency. Although Klein does not refer to it, one of the most
inspiring historical examples of this was the slogan “Everyone Eats the
Same” introduced in the initial phases of the Cuban Revolution and
followed to an extraordinary extent throughout the society. Further,
wartime mobilization and rationing are not the only historical examples
on which we can draw. The New Deal in the United States, she indicates,
focused on public investment and direct promotion of the public good,
aimed at the enhancement of use values rather than exchange values.[14]
Mainstream critics of
This Changes Everything often
willfully confuse its emphasis on degrowth with the austerity policies
associated with neoliberalism. However, Klein’s perspective, as we have
seen, could not be more different, since it is about the rational use of
resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of
equality and community. Nevertheless, she could strengthen her case in
this respect by drawing on monopoly-capital theory and its critique of
the prodigious waste in our economy, whereby only a miniscule proportion
of production and human labor is now devoted to actual human needs as
opposed to market-generated wants. As the author of
No Logo,
Klein is well aware of the marketing madness that characterizes the
contemporary commodity economy, causing the United States alone to spend
more than a trillion dollars a year on the sales effort.[15]
What is required in a rich country such as the United States at present, as detailed in
This Changes Everything,
is not an abandonment of all the comforts of civilization but a
reversion to the standard of living of the 1970s—two decades into what
Galbraith dubbed “the affluent society.” A return to a lower per capita
output (in GDP terms) could be made feasible with redistribution of
income and wealth, social planning, decreases in working time, and
universal satisfaction of genuine human needs (a sustainable
environment; clean air and water; ample food, clothing, and shelter; and
high-quality health care, education, public transportation, and
community-cultural life) such that most people would experience a
substantial improvement in their daily lives.[16] What Klein envisions
here would truly be an ecological-cultural revolution. All that is
really required, since the necessary technological means already exist,
is people power: the democratic mass mobilization of the population.
Such people power, Klein is convinced, is already emerging in the
context of the present planetary emergency. It can be seen in the
massive but diffuse social-environmental movement, stretching across the
globe, representing the struggles of tens of millions of activists
worldwide, to which she gives (or rather takes from the movement itself)
the name
Blockadia. Numberless individuals are putting
themselves on the line, confronting power, and frequently facing arrest,
in their opposition to the fossil-fuel industry and capitalism itself.
Indigenous peoples are organizing worldwide and taking a leading role in
the environmental revolt, as in the Idle No More movement in Canada.
Anti-systemic, ecologically motivated struggles are on the rise on every
continent.
The primary burden for mitigating climate change necessarily resides
with the rich countries, which are historically responsible for the
great bulk of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial
Revolution and still emit the most carbon per capita today. The
disproportionate responsibility of these nations for climate change is
even greater once the final consumption of goods is factored into the
accounting. Poor countries are heavily dependent on producing export
goods for multinational corporations to be sold to consumers at the
center of the world capitalist economy. Hence, the carbon emissions
associated with such exports are rightly assigned to the rich nations
importing these goods rather than the poor ones exporting them.
Moreover, the rich countries have ample resources available to address
the problem and carry out the necessary process of social regeneration
without seriously compromising the basic welfare of their populations.
In these societies, the problem is no longer one of increasing per
capita wealth, but rather one of the rational, sustainable, and just
organization of society. Klein evokes the spirit of Seattle in 1999 and
Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to argue that sparks igniting radical
ecological change exist even in North America, where growing numbers of
people are prepared to join a global peoples’ alliance. Essential to the
overall struggle, she insists, is the explicit recognition of
ecological or climate debt owed by the global North to the global
South.[17]
The left is not spared critical scrutiny in Klein’s work. She
acknowledges the existence of a powerful ecological critique within
Marxism, and quotes Marx on “capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the
natural laws of life itself.
‘”
Nevertheless, she points to the high carbon emissions of Soviet-type
societies, and the heavy dependence of the economies of Bolivia and
Venezuela on natural resource extraction, notwithstanding the many
social justice initiatives they have introduced. She questions the
support given by Greece’s SYRIZA Party to offshore oil exploration in
the Aegean. Many of those on the left, and particularly the so-called
liberal-left, with their Keynesian predilections, continue to see an
expansion of the treadmill of production, even in the rich countries, as
the sole means of social advance.[18] Klein’s criticisms here are
important, but could have benefited, with respect to the periphery, from
a consideration of the structure of the imperialist world economy,
which is designed specifically to close off options to the poorer
countries and force them to meet the needs of the richer ones. This
creates a trap that even a Movement Toward Socialism with deep
ecological and indigenous values like that of present-day Bolivia cannot
seek to overcome without deep contradictions.[19]
“The unfinished business of liberation,” Klein counsels, requires “a
process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective,
the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many
decades of attack and neglect.”[20] To accomplish this, it is necessary
to build the greatest mass movement of humanity for revolutionary change
that the world has ever seen: a challenge that is captured in the title
to her conclusion: “The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible.”
If this seems utopian, her answer would be that the world is heading
towards something worse than mere dystopia: unending, cumulative,
climate catastrophe, threatening civilization and countless species,
including our own.[21]
Liberal critics as gatekeepers
Confronted with Klein’s powerful argument in
This Changes Everything,
liberal pundits have rushed to rein in her arguments so that her ideas
are less in conflict with the system. Even where the issue is planetary
ecological catastrophe, imperiling hundreds of millions of people,
future generations, civilization, and the human species itself, the
inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of capitalism is not to
be questioned.
As Noam Chomsky explains, liberal opinion plays a vital gatekeeping
role for the system, defining itself as the rational left of center, and
constituting the outer boundaries of received opinion. Since most of
the populace in the United States and the world as a whole is
objectively at odds with the regime of capital, it is crucial to the
central propaganda function of the media to declare as “off limits” any
position that questions the foundations of the system itself. The media
effectively says: “Thus far and no further.” To venture farther left
beyond the narrow confines of what is permitted within liberal discourse
is deemed equivalent to taking “off from the planet.”[22]
In the case of an influential radical journalist, activist, and
best-selling author, like Klein, liberal critics seek first and foremost
to refashion her message in ways compatible with the system. They offer
her the opportunity to remain within the liberal fraternity—if she will
only agree to conform to its rules. The aim is not simply to contain
Klein herself but also the movement as a whole that she represents. Thus
we find expressions of sympathy for what is presented as her general
outlook. Accompanying all such praise, however, is a subtle recasting of
her argument in order to blunt its criticism of the system. For
example, it is perfectly permissible on liberal grounds to criticize
neoliberal disaster capitalism, as an extreme policy regime. This should
at no time, however, extend to a blanket critique of capitalism.
Liberal discussions of
This Changes Everything, insofar as they are positive at all, are careful to interpret it as adhering to the former position.
Yet, the very same seemingly soft-spoken liberal pundits are not
above simultaneously brandishing a big stick at the slightest sign of
transgression of the Thus Far and No Further principle. If it should
turn out that Klein is really serious in arguing that “this changes
everything” and actually sees our reality as one of “capitalism vs. the
climate,” then, we are told, she has Taken Off From the Planet, and has
lost her right to be heard within the mass media or to be considered
part of the conversation at all. The aim here is to issue a stern
warning—to remind everyone of the rules by which the game is played, and
the serious sanctions to be imposed on those not conforming. The
penalty for too great a deviation in this respect is excommunication
from the mainstream, to be enforced by the corporate media. Noam Chomsky
may be the most influential intellectual figure alive in the world
today, but he is generally considered beyond the pale and thus
persona non grata where the U.S. media is concerned.
William
Morris: “Between us and that which is to be … there is something alive
and devouring; something as it were a river of fire that will put all
that tries to swim across to a hard proof indeed.”
None of this of course is new. Invited to speak at University
College, Oxford in 1883, with his great friend John Ruskin in the chair,
William Morris, Victorian England’s celebrated artist, master-artisan,
and epic poet, author of
The Earthly Paradise, shocked his
audience by publicly declaring himself “one of the people called
Socialists.” The guardians of the official order (the Podsnaps of
Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend) immediately rose up to denounce
him—overriding Ruskin’s protests—declaring that if they had known of
Morris’s intentions he would not have been given loan of the hall. They
gave notice then and there that he was no longer welcome at Oxford or in
establishment circles. As historian E.P. Thompson put it, “Morris had
crossed the ‘river of fire.’ And the campaign to silence him had
begun.”[23]
Klein, however, presents a special problem for today’s gatekeepers. Her opposition to the logic of capital in
This Changes Everything
is not couched primarily in the traditional terms of the left,
concerned mainly with issues of exploitation. Rather, she makes it clear
that what has finally induced her to cross the river of fire is an
impending threat to the survival of civilization and humanity itself.
She calls for a broad revolt of humanity against capitalism and for the
creation of a more sustainable society in response to the epochal
challenge of our time. This is an altogether different kind of
animal—one that liberals cannot dismiss out of hand without seeming to
go against the scientific consensus and concern for humanity as a whole.
Further complicating matters, Klein upsets the existing order of
things in her book by declaring “the right is right.” By this she means
that the political right’s position on climate change is largely
motivated by what it correctly sees as an Either/Or question of
capitalism vs. the climate. Hence, conservatives seek to deny climate
change—even rejecting the science—in their determination to defend
capitalism. In contrast, liberal ideologues—caught in the selfsame trap
of capitalism vs. the climate—tend to waffle, accepting most of the
science, while turning around and contradicting themselves by
downplaying the logical implications for society. They pretend that
there are easy, virtually painless, non-disruptive ways out of this trap
via still undeveloped technology, market magic, and mild government
regulation—presumably allowing climate change to be mitigated without
seriously affecting the capitalist economy. Rather than accepting the
Either/Or of capitalism against the climate, liberals convert the
problem into one of neoliberalism vs. the climate, insisting that
greater regulation, including such measures as carbon trading and carbon
offsets, constitutes the solution, with no need to address the
fundamental logic of the economic and social system.
Ultimately, it is this liberal form of denialism that is the more
dangerous since it denies the social dimension of the problem and blocks
the necessary social solutions. Hence, it is the liberal view that is
the main target of Klein’s book. In a wider sense, though, conservatives
and liberals can be seen as mutually taking part in a dance in which
they join hands to block any solution that requires going against the
system. The conservative Tweedle Dums dance to the tune that the cost of
addressing climate change is too high and threatens the capitalist
system. Hence, the science that points to the problem must be denied.
The liberal Tweedle Dees dance to the tune that the science is correct,
but that the whole problem can readily be solved with a few virtually
costless tweaks here and there, put into place by a new regulatory
regime. Hence, the system itself is never an issue.
It is her constant exposure of this establishment farce that makes
Klein’s criticism so dangerous. She demands that the gates be flung open
and the room for democratic political and social maneuver be expanded
enormously. What is needed, for starters, is a pro-democracy movement
not simply in the periphery of the capitalist world but at the center of
the system itself, where the global plutocracy has its main
headquarters.
The task from a ruling-class governing perspective, then, is to find a
way to contain or neutralize Klein’s views and those of the entire
radical climate movement. The ideas she represents are to be included in
the corporate media conversation only under extreme sufferance, and
then only insofar as they can be corralled and rebranded to fit within a
generally liberal, reformist perspective: one that does not threaten
the class-based system of capital accumulation.
Rob Nixon can be credited with laying out the general liberal strategy in this respect in a review of Klein’s book in the
New York Times. He declares outright that Klein has written “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since ‘Silent Spring.
‘”
He strongly applauds her for her criticisms of climate change deniers,
and for revealing how industry has corrupted the political process,
delaying climate action. All of this, however, is preliminary to his
attempt to rein in her argument. There is a serious flaw in her book, we
are told, evident in her subtitle,
Capitalism vs. the Climate. “What’s with the subtitle?” he scornfully asks. Then stepping in as Klein’s friend and protector, Nixon tells
New York Times
readers that the subtitle is simply a mistake, to be ignored. We should
not be thrown off, he proclaims, by a “subtitle” that “sounds like a
P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight.” Rather, “Klein’s adversary
is neoliberalism—the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of
extreme extraction.” In this subtle recasting of her argument, Klein
reemerges as a mere critic of capitalist excess, rejecting specific
attributes taken on by the system in its neoliberal phase that can be
easily discarded, and that do not touch the system’s fundamental
properties. Her goal, we are told, is the same as in
The Shock Doctrine:
turning back the neoliberal “counterrevolution,” returning us to a more
humane Golden Age liberal order. Her subtitle can therefore be
dismissed in its entirety, as it “belies the sophistication” of her
work: code for her supposed conformity to the Thus Far and No Further
principle. Employing ridicule as a gatekeeping device—with the
implication that this is the sorry fate that awaits anyone who
transgresses Thus Far and No Further—Nixon states that “Klein is smart
and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global
overthrow.”[24]
Dave Pruett in
The Huffington Post quickly falls into step, showing how well he comprehends the general strategy already outlined by Nixon in the
New York Times.
At the same time, he indicates his readiness to pull in the reins a bit
more. Thus we find again that Klein’s book is a “masterpiece,” to be
put on the same shelf as Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring. And once again we learn that her subtitle,
Capitalism vs. the Climate
is a “misnomer.” Resorting to a classic Cold War ploy, Pruett further
insinuates that the subtitle gives “critics room to accuse Klein of
advocating for some discredited Soviet-style state-regulated economy.”
Of course such critics, he turns around and says, would surely be wrong.
Klein’s argument in
This Changes Everything is really nothing more than a criticism of “
unbridled capitalism—that is, neoliberalism.” Moreover, the “true culprit” of her argument is even more specific than this: “
extractivism,”
or the extreme exploitation of non-renewable natural resources. Still,
Pruett, through his classic Cold War ploy, has with consummate skill
planted in advance a lingering doubt and a warning in the mind of the
reader, along with an implicit threat directed at Klein herself. If it
should turn out that Klein is serious about her subtitle, and she is
actually talking about “capitalism vs. the climate,” then she is
discredited in advance by the fate of the Soviet Union, with which she
is then to be associated.[25]
Approaching
This Changes Everything much more bluntly, Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for the
New York Review of Books,
quickly lets us know that she has not come to praise Klein but to bury
her. Klein’s references to conservation, “managed degrowth,” and the
need to shrink humanity’s ecological footprint, Kolbert says, are all
non-marketable ideas, to be condemned on straightforwardly
capitalist-consumerist principles. Such strategies and actions will not
sell to today’s consumers, even if the future of coming generations is
in jeopardy. Nothing will get people to give up “HDTV or trips to the
mall or the family car.” Unless it is demonstrated how acting on climate
change will result in a “minimal disruption to ‘the American way of
life,
‘”she asserts, nothing
said with respect to climate change action matters at all. Klein has
simply provided a convenient “fable” of little real value.
This Changes Everything
is indicted for having violated accepted commercial axioms in its core
thesis, which Kolbert converts into an argument for extreme austerity.
Klein is to be faulted for her grandiose schemes that do not fit into
U.S. consumer society, and for not “looking at all closely at what this
[reduction in the commodity economy] would entail.” Klein has failed to
specify exactly how many watts of electricity per capita will be
consumed under her plan. It is much easier, Kolbert seems to say, for
U.S. consumers to imagine the end of a climate permitting human survival
than to envision the end of two-million-square-foot shopping malls.[26]
David Ulin in the
Los Angeles Times unveils still another
weapon in the liberal arsenal, denouncing Klein for her optimism and her
faith in humanity. “There is, in places,” he emphasizes, “a disconnect
between her [Klein’s] idealism and her realism, what she thinks ought to
happen and what she recognizes likely will.” Social analysis, in Ulin’s
view, seems to be reduced to forecasting the most likely outcomes.
Klein apparently failed to consult with Las Vegas oddsmakers before
making her case for saving humanity. Klein’s penchant for idealism, he
declares, “is most glaring in her suggestions for large-scale policy
mitigation, which can seem simplistic, relying on notions of fairness
…that
corporate culture does not share.” Regrettably, Ulin does not tell us
exactly where the kind of climate justice programs put in place by Exxon
and Walmart’s “corporate culture” will actually lead us in the end.
However, he does give us a specious clue in his final paragraph,
describing what he apparently considers to be the most realistic
scenario. The planet, we are informed, “has ample power to rock, burn,
and shake us off completely.” The earth will go on without us.[27]
Other liberal gatekeepers pull out all the stops, attacking not just
every radical notion in Klein’s book but the book as a whole, and even
Klein herself. Writing for the influential liberal news and opinion
website, the
Daily Beast, Michael Signer characterizes Klein’s
book as “a curiously clueless manifesto.” It will not spark a movement
against carbon, in part because Klein “rejects capitalism, market
mechanisms, and even, seemingly, profit motives and corporate
governance.” She offers “a compelling story,” but one that “creates the
paradoxical effect of making this perspicacious and successful author
seem like an idiot.” Signer depicts her as if she has Taken Off From the
Planet simply by refusing to stay within the narrow spectrum of opinion
defined by the
Wall Street Journal on the one side and the
New York Times
on the other. “For anyone who believes in capitalism and political
leadership,” we are informed, “her book won’t change anything at
all.”[28]
Mark Jaccard, an orthodox economist writing for the
Literary Review of Canada, declares that
This Changes Everything
ignores how market-based mechanisms are a powerful means for reducing
carbon emissions. However, his main evidence for this contention is
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of a climate bill in California in 2006,
which is supposed to reduce the state’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels
by 2020. Unfortunately for Jaccard’s claim, a little over a week before
he criticized Klein on the basis of the California experiment, the
Los Angeles Times
broke the story that California’s emissions reduction initiative was in
some respects a “shell game,” as California was reducing emissions on
paper while emissions were growing in surrounding states from which
California was also increasingly purchasing power.[29] Add to this the
facts that California’s initiative is more state-based than
capital-based, and that the real problem is not one of getting down to
1990 level emissions, but getting down to pre-1760 level emissions,
i.e., carbon emissions eventually have to fall to zero—and not just in
California but worldwide.
Jaccard goes on to accuse Klein of wearing
“‘blame
capitalism’ blinders” that keep her from seeing the actual difficulties
that make dealing with climate so imposing. This includes her failure
to perceive the “Faustian dilemma” associated with fossil fuels, given
that they have yielded so many benefits for humanity and can offer many
more to the poor of the world. “This dilemma,” which he is so proud to
have discovered, “is not the fault of capitalism.” Indeed, capitalist
economics, we are told, is already well equipped to solve the climate
problem and only misguided state policies stand in the way. Drawing upon
an argument presented by Paul Krugman in his
New York Times
column, Jaccard suggests that “greenhouse gas reductions have proven to
be not nearly as costly as science deniers on the right and anti-growth
activists on the left would have us believe.” Krugman, a Tweedle Dee,
rejects the carefree Tweedle Dum melody whereby climate change, as a
threat to the system, is simply wished away along with the science. He
counters this simple, carefree tune with what he regards as a more
complex, harmonious song in which the problem is whisked away in spite
of the science by means of a few virtually costless market regulations.
So convinced is Jaccard himself of capitalism’s basic harmonious
relation to the climate that he simply turns a deaf ear to Klein’s
impressive account of the vast system-scale changes required to stop
climate change.[30]
Will Boisvert, commenting on behalf of the self-described
“post-environmentalist” Breakthrough Institute, condemns Klein and the
entire environmental movement in an article pointedly entitled, “The
Left vs. the Climate: Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein’s
Pastoral Fantasy—and Embrace Our High Energy Planet.” Apparently it is
not industry that is destroying a livable climate through its carbon
dioxide emissions, but rather environmentalists, by refusing to adopt
the Breakthrough Institute’s technological crusade for surmounting
nature’s limits on a planetary scale. As Breakthrough senior fellow
Bruno Latour writes in an article for the Institute, it is necessary “to
love your monsters,” meaning the kind of Frankenstein creations
envisioned in Mary Shelley’s novel. Humanity should be prepared to put
its full trust, the Breakthrough Institute tells us, in such wondrous
technological answers as nuclear power, “clean coal,” geoengineering,
and fracking. For its skepticism regarding such technologies, the whole
left (and much of the scientific community) is branded as a bunch of
Luddites. As Boisvert exclaims in terms designed to delight the entire
corporate sector:
“To make a useful contribution to changing
everything, the Left could begin by changing itself. It could start by
redoing its risk assessments and rethinking its phobic hostility to
nuclear power. It could abandon the infatuation with populist
insurrection and advance a serious politics of systematic state action.
It could stop glamorizing austerity under the guise of spiritual
authenticity and put development prominently on its environmental
agenda. It could accept that industry and technology do indeed distance
us from nature—and in doing so can protect nature from human
extractions. And it could realize that, as obnoxious as capitalism can
be, scapegoating it won’t spare us the hard thinking and hard trade-offs
that a sustainable future requires.”[31]
Boisvert here echoes Erle Ellis, who, in an earlier essay for the
Breakthrough Institute, contended that climate change is not a
catastrophic threat, because “human systems are prepared to adapt to and
prosper in the hotter, less biodiverse planet that we are busily
creating.” On this basis, Boisvert chastises Klein and all who think
like her for refusing to celebrate capitalism’s creative destruction of
everything in existence.[32]
Klein of course is not caught completely unaware by such attacks. For
those imbued in the values of the current system, she writes in her
book, “changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and
disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the
fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.”[33]
Indeed, all of the mainstream challenges to
This Changes Everything
discussed above have one thing in common: they insist that capitalism
is the “end of history,” and that the buildup of carbon in the
atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and the threat that this
represents to life as we know it change nothing about today’s
Panglossian best of all possible worlds.
The ultimate line of defense
Naturally, it is not simply liberals, but also socialists, in some cases, who have attacked
This Changes Everything.
Socialist critics, though far more sympathetic with her analysis, are
inclined to fault her book for not being explicit enough about the
nature of system change, the full scale of the transformations required,
and the need for socialism.[34] Klein says little about the vital
question of the working class, without which the revolutionary changes
she envisions are impossible. It is therefore necessary to ask: To what
extent is the ultimate goal to build a new movement toward socialism, a
society to be controlled by the associated producers? Such questions
still remain unanswered by the left climate movement and by Klein
herself.
In our view, though, it is difficult to fault Klein for her silences
in this respect. Her aim at present is clearly confined to the urgent
and strategic—if more limited—one of making the broad case for System
Change Not Climate Change. Millions of people, she believes, are
crossing or are on the brink of crossing the river of fire. Capitalism,
they charge, is now obsolete, since it is no longer compatible either
with our survival as a species or our welfare as individual human
beings. Hence, we need to build society anew in our time with all the
human creativity and collective imagination at our disposal. It is this
burgeoning global movement that is now demanding anti-capitalist and
post-capitalist solutions. Klein sees herself merely as the people’s
megaphone in this respect. The goal, she explains, is a complex social
one of fusing all of the many anti-systemic movements of the left. The
struggle to save a habitable earth is
humanity’s ultimate line of defense—but
one that at the same time requires that we take the offensive, finding
ways to move forward collectively, extending the boundaries of liberated
space. David Harvey usefully describes this fusion of movements as a
co-revolutionary strategy.[35]
Is the vision presented in
This Changes Everything
compatible with a classical socialist position? Given the deep
ecological commitments displayed by Marx, Engels, and Morris, there is
little room for doubt—which is not to deny that socialists need to
engage in self-criticism, given past failures to implement ecological
values and the new challenges that characterize our epoch. Yet, the
whole question strikes us in a way as a bit odd, since historical
materialism does not represent a rigid, set position, but is rather the
ongoing struggle for a world of substantive equality and sustainable
human development. As Morris wrote in
A Dream of John Ball:
“But while I pondered all these things, and how
men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes
about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be
what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under
another name—while I pondered all this, John Ball began to speak again
in the same soft and clear voice with which he had left off.”
In this “soft and clear voice,” Ball, a leader in the
fourteenth-century English Peasant’s Revolt, proceeded, in Morris’s
retelling, to declare that the one true end was “Fellowship on earth”—an
end that was also the
movement of the people and could never be stopped.[36]
Klein offers us anew this same vision of human community borne of an
epoch of revolutionary change. “There is little doubt,” she declares in
her own clear voice,
“that another crisis will see us in the streets
and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is
what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and
confidence with which it will be seized. Because these moments when the
impossible seems suddenly possible are excruciatingly rare and precious.
That means more must be made of them. The next time one arises, it must
be harnessed not only to denounce the world as it is, and build
fleeting pockets of liberated space. It must be the catalyst to actually
build the world that will keep us all safe. The stakes are simply too
high, and time too short, to settle for anything less.”[37]
The ultimate goal of course is not simply “to build the world that
will keep us all safe” but to build a world of genuine equality and
human community—the only conceivable basis for sustainable human
development. Equality, Simón Bolívar exclaimed, is “the law of
laws.”[38]
Notes
- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), “‘A Feeling It’s Gonna Be Huge: Naomi Klein on People’s Climate Eve” (interview),Common Dreams, September 21, 2014, http://commondreams.org.
- On this, see Adam Morris, “The ‘System Change’ Doctrine,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 21, 2014, http://lareviewofbooks.org; System Change Not Climate Change,http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org; Klein, This Changes Everything, 87–89.
- William Morris, Collected Works (London: Longmans Green, 1914), vol. 22, 131–32; E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 244; Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), The Shock Doctrine (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 342, 444–47.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 55.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report,http://ipcc.ch; trillionthtonne.org, accessed January 3, 2015; “Carbon Budget Message of IPCC Report Reveals Daunting Challenge,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2013, http://huffingtonpost.com; Myles Allen, et. al., “The Exit Strategy,” Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, http://nature.com,
56–58. It should be noted that the trillionth metric ton calculation is
based on carbon, not carbon dioxide. Moreover, the 2039 estimate of the
point at which the trillion metric ton will be reached, made by
trillionthtonne.org (sponsored by scientists at Oxford University),
should be regarded as quite optimistic under present, business-as-usual
conditions, since less than three years ago, at the end of 2012, it was
estimated that the trillion ton would be reached in 2043, or in
thirty-one years. (See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The
Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review
64, no. 7 [December 2012]: 2.) The gap, according to these estimates, is
thus closing faster as time passes and nothing is done to reduce
emissions.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 13, 21, 56, 87; Kevin Anderson, “Why Carbon Prices Can’t Deliver the 2° Target,” August 15, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info.
- Klein, This Changes Everything,
19, 56. The fact that neoliberal globalization and the creation of the
WTO had permanently derailed the movement associated with the Earth
Summit in Rio in 1993, including the attempt to prevent climate change,
was stressed by one of us more than a dozen years ago at the World
Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002, when Klein was
present. See John Bellamy Foster, “A Planetary Defeat: The Failure of Global Environmental Reform,”Monthly Review 54, no. 8 (January 2003): 1–9, originally based on several talks delivered in Johannesburg, August 2002.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 21–24.
- Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 349.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 179; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1984), 121–28. As the author of No Logo, Klein is of course aware of the contradictions of consumption under capitalist commodity production.
- Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1951), 293.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 57–58, 115, 479–80.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 10, 16–17, 115–16, 454; Adolfo Gilly, “Inside the Cuban Revolution,” Monthly Review 16, no. 6 (October 1964): 69; John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 13.
- “U,.S. Marketing Spending Exceeded $1 Trillion in 2005,” Metrics Business and Marketing Intelligence, June 26, 2006, http://metrics2.com; Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 91–94.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 381–82, 408–13.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 176–87; “‘A Feeling It’s Gonna Be Huge.’”
- For historical materialist
analyses of the extractivism problem in Bolivia and the difficult
problem of overcoming it see Álvaro García Linera, Geopolitics of the Amazon, 2012,http://climateandcapitalism.com; Frederico Fuentes, “The Dangerous Myths of ‘Anti-Extractivism’,” May 19, 2014, http://climateandcapitalism.com. As the author of The Shock Doctrine,
Klein is cognizant of imperialism but it does not enter in her analysis
much here, partly because she is making a point of being balanced by
criticizing the left as well as the right.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 458–60.
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 43, 58–63.
- Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (New York: Black Rose Books, 1994), 58. On the “off limits” notion see Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism: The Absurd System,” Monthly Review 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 2.
- Thompson, William Morris, 270–71; Morris, Collected Works, vol. 23, 172.
- Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything,’” New York Times, November 6, 2014,http://nytimes.com.
- Dave Pruett, “A Line in the Tar Sands: Naomi Klein on the Climate,” Huffington Post, November 26, 2014, http://huffingtonpost.com.
- Elizabeth Kolbert, “Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014, http://nybooks.com; Naomi Klein and Elizabeth Kolbert, “Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015, http:// nybooks.com.
- David L. Ulin, “In ‘This Changes Everything,’ Naomi Klein Sounds Climate Alarm,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2014, http://touch.latimes.com.
- Michael Signer, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Will Change Nothing,” Daily Beast, November 17, 2014, http://thedailybeast.com.
- Mark Jaccard, “I Wish This Changed Everything,” Literary Review of Canada, November 2014,http://reviewcanada.ca; “Despite California Climate Law, Carbon Emissions May be a Shell Game,”Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2014, http://latimes.com.
- Mark Jaccard, “I Wish This Changed Everything”; Paul Krugman, “Errors and Emissions,” New York Times, September 8, 2014, http://nytimes.com.
- Will Boisvert, “The Left vs. the Climate: Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein’s Pastoral Fantasy—and Embrace Our High-Energy Planet,” The Breakthrough, September 18, 2014,http://thebreakthrough.org; Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters,” The Breakthrough
no. 2, Fall 2011, http://thebreakthrough. Klein herself situates the
Breakthrough Institute within her criticism of the right, questioning
its claim to progressive values. Klein, This Changes Everything, 57.
- Erle Ellis, “The Planet of No Return,” The Breakthrough no. 2, Fall 2011,http://thebreakthrough.org; Boisvert, “The Left vs. the Climate.”
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 89.
- See the important analysis in Richard Smith, “Climate Crisis, the Deindustrialization Imperative and the Jobs vs. Environment Dilemma,” Truthout, November 12, 2014, http://truth-out.org.
- David Harvey, The Engima of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–35.
- William Morris, Three Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986).
- Klein, This Changes Everything, 466.
- Símon Bólivar, “Message to the Congress of Bolivia, May 25, 1826,” Selected Works, vol. 2 (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), 603.
