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Toward Climate-Catalyzed Social Transformation?
Toward Climate-Catalyzed Social Transformation?
Applying the work of Erik Olin Wright to emergent climate change movements helps us to understand current trajectories and possible pathways for transformation.
In the past weeks, Extinction Rebellion has continued to make news headlines with acts of protest in London, Boston, New York and other cities across the globe. In London, thousands of activists blocked roads and bridges and over 1,000 were arrested. These actions are a part of Extinction Rebellion’s ongoing strategy to disrupt the economy and pressure governments to meet their demands to address climate change.
In addition, the youth movement Fridays for Future continues to hold school strikes with an estimated 1.6 million participants across the globe on March 15. In the United States, the Sunrise Movement has just launched a tour to promote the Green New Deal, a possibly transformative resolution that targets both inequality and greenhouse gas emissions.
These movements are unprecedented, growing, and are unlikely to go away any time soon. In addition, meeting the demands of these movements would require significant social and economic changes through a radical political program.
Given the momentum of these movements, are we on the verge of a possible climate-catalyzed social transformation? And if so, what strategies for transformation will be most effective?
To interpret the recent rise of these climate change movements, we draw from the late Erik Olin Wright whose work illustrates a deep understanding of social transformation.
In his book Envisioning Real Utopias, Wright outlined a detailed theory of social transformation with four main components. First, identify the forces of social reproduction that impede positive social change. Second, find gaps and contradictions that can be politicized to open the door for change. Third, understand and build a trajectory of change: history tells us that transformation occurs when unintended social consequences combine with purposeful social movements.
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Dissecting the Madness of Economic Reason
David Harvey’s latest book provides a riveting reading of Marx’s Capital and a trenchant critique of a political and economic system spiralling out of control.
A decade after the financial crisis of 2008, global capitalism remains in dire straits. Despite central banks providing a steady diet of low interest rates and pumping over $12 trillion of new money into the world economy through quantitative easing, growth remains anaemic, even as debt levels in many countries are back on the rise and inequality rapidly spirals out of control. Secular stagnation now goes hand in hand with the emergence of new speculative bubbles in stocks and housing, raising fears that fresh financial turmoil and further debt crises may only be a matter of time.
With mainstream economics clearly incapable of providing a satisfactory account of capitalism’s inherent tendency towards crisis formation, the past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the work of Karl Marx, undoubtedly the most astute observer of the system’s internal contradictions. Perhaps no other living scholar has played a more important role in this renaissance of Marxist theorizing than David Harvey, the geographer whose many books and celebrated online course on Capital weaned a new generation of students and activists on an innovative reading of Marx’s critique of political economy.
In his new book, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, Harvey provides a concise introduction to Marx’s theoretical framework and a compelling argument for its increasing relevance to the “insane and deeply troubling world in which we live.” Fleshing out a number of ideas first presented as part of a lecture series at the City University of New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, the book is characteristic of the “late Harvey”: incisive in its analysis, sweeping in its scope, accessible in its style and laced with profound insights on the madness of the economic system under which we live.
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Defying Dystopia: Shaping the Climate Future We Want
Defying Dystopia: Shaping the Climate Future We Want
We live in an age of dystopias on demand. Whether it’s Black Mirror, The Hunger Games or The Handmaid’s Tale, there is no limit to satiating our desires for dark, apocalyptic visions of the future. Unfortunately the scariest experience does not involve the world of the imaginary; it just requires reading the latest climate science.
In one such piece in July 2017, New York Magazine managed to pull together all the possible worst-case climate scenarios in a longread called “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Through interviews with climate scientists, it painted a world of bacterial plagues escaping from melting ice, devastating droughts and floods so frequent they are just called “weather,” and biblical-like tableaus of entire nations on the move. The piece is bleaker than the darkest of sci-fi, because there is no way of dismissing it as fiction.
Facing our fears of climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges we face as activists. Not a week goes by without warnings of an “ice apocalypse” or a “point of no return.” We are bombarded with bleak visions of the future. And it’s a challenge that we continue to struggle with — one we have mainly filled with demands for action. For a long time, the answer was to provide easy actions that people could take so they could feel empowered. But it was soon evident that no amount of energy-saving lightbulbs was going to halt the capitalist juggernaut. Now the answer, from the left at least, is that we must confront capitalism to overcome climate change. Yet this can hardly be described as an easy win, or likely to allay our fears of a dangerous future.
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Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology
Settled agriculture, cities, nation-states, information technology and every other facet of the modern world have unfolded within a long era of climatic good fortune. Those days are gone. Sea levels are rising; climate is becoming less stable; average temperatures are increasing. Civilization emerged in a geological era known as the Holocene. Some have called our new climate era the Anthropocene. Future intelligent life will know we were here because some humans have filled the fossil record with such marvels as radiation from atomic bombs, plastics from the oil industry and chicken bones.
What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semi-compulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t imagine a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.
We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch. The first task is one of conceptual rigor, to note a problem in naming our new geological epoch the Anthropocene. The root, anthropos(Greek for “human”), suggests that it’s just humans being humans, in the way that kids will be kids or snakes will be snakes, that has caused climate change and the planet’s sixth mass extinction.
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It was the creditors who pushed Greece over the edge
It was the creditors who pushed Greece over the edge
If they had truly cared, the creditors could have easily prevented a default. Sadly, they found it more important to punish Greece and set an example.
Image: sticking posters for the NO campaign ahead of Sunday’s referendum.
On Tuesday, Greece became the first developed country to default on the IMF — and the pro-creditor camp is already propagating the convenient self-serving myth that the country’s “radical” and “irresponsible” government is somehow to blame for this. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To begin with, we should note that defaults come in many forms and guises — and not all of them are the debtor’s fault. In my own research on the political economy of sovereign debt, I identify at least four types of default: (1) negotiated reschedulings; (2) voluntary restructurings; (3) unilateral moratoriums; and (4) outright debt repudiations.
What is interesting about sovereign debt in general (and about international lending in particular) is the almost wholesale absence of repudiation. By and large, countries try extremely hard to repay their debts in full and on time — even when they cannot. In the worst case scenarios, they may be able to negotiate a rescheduling or restructuring of the debt with their lenders. In exceptional cases, countries can declare a moratorium on repayments. While this was very commonprior to World War II, it is extremely rare today.
In this respect, the first thing to note is that Greece clearly did not repudiate its debts outright: despite the preliminary conclusions of the Greek parliamentary debt audit committee, which found much of the country’s debt to be odious, illegitimate and illegal, the Syriza/ANEL government still formally recognizes the legally binding character of the debt contracts. Its IMF default therefore looks more like an undeclared moratorium: Greece could still settle its arrears with the Fund at a later stage if it somehow managed to secure new credit.
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