It is a measure of the state of climate politics when apparently radical thinkers accommodate themselves to the mainstream. In Climate Capitalism by Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson (2010) the disorientation of climate activists has found its academic expression.
Paterson wrote one of the seminal books on climate change in the 1990s. His Global Warming and Global Politics (1996) pulled to pieces the standard bourgeois international relations theories of global climate politics and proposed a more adequate political economy framework based on Marx and Gramsci. Peter Newell’s book, Climate for Change (2000), built on this approach, to critique the function of IPCC scientists, the role of the media and fossil fuel corporations, as well as championing the work of NGOs in the climate process. Although neither has been an exponent of working class politics, much of their analysis was at least anti-capitalist and sympathetic to radical ecology. This work lurches towards detente with orthodox climate politics.
Newell and Paterson’s central argument is encapsulated in the title: Climate Capitalism. They believe that low-carbon capitalism is not only possible and but that it is the only viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism today. What follows from this argument, according to the authors, is that climate activists should makes alliances and build a coalition with financial capitalists to bring this low carbon capitalist society about. In my view these arguments are flawed.
Capitalism
Newell and Paterson argue that, “the challenge of climate change means in effect, either abandoning capitalism, or seeking to find a way to grow while gradually replacing coal, oil and gas”. However for them, “the issue is less whether we have climate capitalism or not, but rather what sort of climate capitalism we end up with. Capitalism of one form another will provide the context in which near-term solutions to climate change have to be found”. (2010 p.9, p.161)
Popular variants of this argument are common among climate activists. Campaigners say “we can’t wait for socialism” to take action on climate change. Some point to the labour movement and argue that it is a long way from being a force that can contend for power. But recognition that capitalism provides the immediate context within which climate change has to be tackled does not mean the only way to campaign is to accept these limits and further to support capitalism. After all it is capitalism that drives the causes of emissions and capitalism that means the effects are borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable. Better to frame it this way: 1) the fight to tackle climate change under capitalism proceeds in spite of and against the capitalist system, and in opposition to the capitalist actors that have brought it about; 2) without socialism, a systematic, democratic, collective, planned alternative to capitalism, it is highly unlikely climate change will be tackled adequately at all, or at least in an equitable way.
Neoliberalism
Newell and Paterson rightly acknowledge the dominance of neoliberal climate change politics, meaning that, “the character of neoliberal capitalism has fundamentally shaped how we have responded to climate change. The four key elements... the fixation with markets, the domination of finance, the widening of global inequalities, and the focus on networks as a means of organising – have all combined to shape the character of responses to climate change”. (2010 p.23-24) However by accepting capitalism as the only alternative, they make huge concessions to this actually existing neoliberal regime.
Much of the book elides into outright support for the mainstream market “solutions” to climate change, such as the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme and the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism. For example, they write: “From our point of view, the EU ETS has been a success – in political terms at least – because it satisfies one of the key questions raised by the imperative of climate capitalism: it creates a cycle of economic growth which can (in principle) promote decarbonisation, and can generate a whole constituency of interests in maintaining, even ratcheting up the system. This includes city traders (mostly in London) who do the bulk of the day-to-day trading, the project developers for offset projects, the management consultants helping companies engage in ‘carbon asset management’, the auditors assessing the emissions of companies and so on. All these now have a vested interest in progressively stronger climate policy, because of the EU ETS.” (2010 p.104)
Actors
The collapse into mainstream politics is nowhere better illustrated by Newell and Paterson’s advocacy of finance capital as the crucial social agent for tackling climate change. They write that: “Advances can be made when environmental activists get together with city financiers, or when carbon traders and development NGOs put their minds together to get money to flow into low-carbon development.” They conclude: “To shift from capitalism-as-usual to climate capitalism will require novel and imaginative forms of coalition and alliance-building... it is about bringing together people who could never have previously imagined working together – environmentalists with venture capitalists, trade unionists and business leaders, local government officials and UN bureaucrats.” (2010 p.ix, p.188) Here is precisely the kind of climate popular frontism we have denounced elsewhere, such as over the Green New Deal.
Working class climate politics
Working class climate politics starts from the recognition that the causes of climate change are rooted in the core drives of capitalism. Precisely the mechanisms through which the working class is exploited by capital are those that give rise to spiralling carbon emissions, and lead to the real subsumption of climate under capital. Secondly a Marxist understanding of neoliberal capitalism puts finance capital at the centre of this modern regime. Far from being separate and opposed to fossil fuel capital, finance is intimately bound up and integrated with it. It was precisely the fusion of productive/industrial capital with finance capital that stood out to Kautsky, Hilferding and Lenin a century ago. And one need only ask who finances fossil fuel capital, who moves its profits around, who invests and advises energy multinationals to see the interconnections between the two. Therefore finance is not a potential ally in the enemy camp – it is just as much the enemy of climate campaigners as Shell and BP.
Working class climate politics requires a conception of change that has much in common with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. On this view the bourgeoisie are not the best makers of even a bourgeois revolution. Instead we put the working class and the organised labour movement at the centre of alliances with other social forces and campaigners. It is possible to raise demands to reduce emissions and tackle climate change while fighting capitalism. It is possible to integrate demands to protect the climate with the fight for socialism. The best revolutionary socialists have always fought for reforms, as part of preparing the workers and their allies for the bigger struggles ahead, to widen the scope for action, to improve the context in which fundamental change can take place. Raising transitional class-based demands, building united fronts between workers’ organisations and with others, without losing sight of the need to change the government and ultimately the system – this is a real alternative for climate politics.
There is a glimmer of recognition of this in the book. Newell and Paterson accept that the activities of critics of carbon markets “are thus crucial to producing the pressure to regulate those markets”.
By analogy they point to the union activists in the 1930s who, “wanted to abolish capitalism, but in practice contributed to a better-regulated and more successful version of it”. (2010 p.180) Perhaps the fight to tackle climate change may not end in the overthrow of capitalism. It may just “decarbonise” capitalism. However to start with self-limiting politics and to promote alliances with the very actors who are bound up with the problem and who do so little about it, seems precisely the kind of astroturf climate politics the authors have previously been keen to criticise.
