In the period between the economic crises of 2008 and 2020, socialism and environmentalism converged within growing democratic socialist movements on either side of the Atlantic. The rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn appeared to offer shortcuts to state power for socialists and climate activists who had made limited progress in previous years. Could two of the nation states most culpable for the ecological crisis really have their liberal democracies captured by democratic socialists simultaneously?
Labour went into the December 2019 general election with the most ambitious climate justice policies of any party in Europe, largely as a result of activism by the campaign Labour for a Green New Deal, which successfully pushed the Party towards a radical environmentalist platform commensurate with the scale of the climate crisis.
The Labour for a Green New Deal campaign aimed to take advantage of the political space opened up by Corbyn’s leadership. Its co-founders had backgrounds in grassroots climate organising, student movements, internationalist solidarity and tenants’ unions. Working within Labour meant navigating the Party’s sometimes murky democracy by displaying the weight of support among members (evidenced by the 150-plus local constituency parties who submitted Labour for a Green New Deal’s motion to the 2019 Party conference) and persuading the larger general unions (Unite, GMB and UNISON) to join with others, including the CWU (Communication Workers Union) and FBU (Fire Brigades Union), in supporting a programme for climate justice that puts all workers, including energy workers, at its core. This was a moment of historic unity between trade unions and climate activists, with the Labour Party as the vehicle.
In her speech to the Party conference in September 2019, Rebecca Long-Bailey succinctly articulated why many find the Green New Deal so appealing. Building on George Monbiot’s argument for ‘private sufficiency and public luxury’, she told delegates: ‘My socialism and your socialism isn’t about luck. It’s about saving the planet and ushering in a new era of public luxury based on social and climate justice.’
Labour’s subsequent election defeat was devastating to all those who had been fighting to prepare the Party to deliver a Green New Deal in government. It demonstrated that there is no easy road to socialism in the UK. Sanders’s 2020 campaign remained a source of optimism for a time, until establishment Democrats rallied around Joe Biden’s candidacy.
It would be naïve for the left to pin all its hopes for climate justice on the election of democratic socialists in the global North. Had Corbyn become prime minister, those fossil fuel companies whose activities are accelerating the climate crisis would have invested extensively in disrupting rapid decarbonisation. Labour’s Green New Deal would have faced resistance from the private interests controlling key infrastructure: transport operators, energy companies, housing developers. National Grid threatened to sue Labour over plans to bring the energy network into democratic ownership.
We must face up to the real possibility not only of further defeat at the ballot box but also of stubborn resistance by capital if and when we do command state power. How then should eco-socialists orient ourselves politically in the 2020s? What is our strategy for winning and exercising power to transform and decarbonise the economy?
Electoralism alone is not sufficient to achieve climate justice, but it remains strategically necessary. In the years leading up to 2019, a convergence of unlikely factors opened up the possibility of socialists winning state power through the Labour Party to deliver a broad suite of social and environmental ambitions. Previously influenced by anarchist ideologies, the climate movement was forced to reconsider the question of state power when it came into contact with Corbynism.
The promise of the Green New Deal is massive state-led investment, regulation and economic transformation, both to decarbonise and simultaneously to guarantee human rights, needs and prosperity. Harnessing state power is the only way to bring about the swift transformations that can halt climate change, and do so justly.
The impacts of climate change are different in character to those of capitalist exploitation and oppression more generally. While capitalism wreaks immeasurable suffering globally, climate breakdown will render our planet irreversibly uninhabitable. Leading scientists have warned of a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario in which we reach planetary tipping points faster than predicted, as higher temperatures unlock new sources of greenhouse gas emissions through positive feedback loops.* Human efforts to reverse the breakdown would quickly become futile.
The suffering caused by the disruption of our environmental systems will not be evenly felt, but few will be completely immune. Climate justice movements have long made a point of the inequitable global distribution of ecological impacts: while capital in the global North profits, populations in the global South endure flooding, drought and extreme weather events. But recent wildfires in Australia and California, flooding in Yorkshire and South-East England and back-to-back storms across the UK have demonstrated that climate breakdown is an urgent problem for the global North, too.
As liberal governments remain unable to devise or implement proportionate solutions, socialists are increasingly embracing responsibility for putting forward a vision for climate justice. Climate breakdown is now one of the most important factors for those developing socialist strategy to consider.
Interviewed by Tribune in the aftermath of the election defeat, Leo Panitch warned that climate breakdown must not be used as a pretext for socialists to shorten their strategic time horizons. He advised activists to ‘commit for the long haul’ and ‘think in terms of ten, fifteen or twenty years’. This is the time-frame required to rebuild working-class organisations, which is a necessary precondition for socialists both to capture and to exercise state power.†
The tension between the time it takes to build the basis for socialism and the time left to mitigate runaway climate breakdown is excruciating. Socialists cannot neglect the temporality of climate breakdown, but nor can we lapse into frantic, short-sighted strategy. With the Green New Deal we have a plan to mitigate climate breakdown through the same interventions required to build a prosperous socialist society.
Some critics of the Green New Deal have called instead for a politics of ‘degrowth’, blaming the relentless pursuit of economic growth for the ecological crises we now face. It would be a mistake for socialists to get hung up on reversing ‘growth’ per se, rather than systematically undoing the dominance of the profit motive throughout the economy by disempowering capital in favour of workers and the public. The COVID-19 pandemic has proved that it is possible to contract the economy quickly, with the effect of dramatically cutting carbon emissions. But as recession follows in its wake, the pandemic also shows that simply shrinking the economy without transforming it is both unjust and insufficient as a strategy for tackling the climate emergency.
In March 2020, the coronavirus crisis swiftly brought the entire aviation industry to the brink of bankruptcy. Virgin Airlines grounded 80 per cent of flights and asked staff to take eight weeks of unpaid leave; Norwegian Air laid off 90 per cent of its employees. Aviation must transition to zero carbon or become almost obsolete, but not like this, with thousands of workers plunged into insecurity.
Carbon emissions have fallen during the pandemic lockdown, but these emissions are the tip of a very large iceberg. Fossil fuels are still the basis of the economy that remains. As capitalism continues to immiserate, it is no coincidence that the crises of climate, inequality and now public health have the same solutions: expanding public ownership right across the economy.
The Green New Deal rejects alienating appeals to climate austerity, which push responsibility for decarbonising onto those least responsible for reproducing fossil capitalism. Moralising won’t make individuals change their behaviour within capitalism. A Green New Deal would restructure our economy so that the ‘greenest’ choice is the cheapest and easiest.
Public luxury means limited private car ownership counterbalanced with free public transport efficiently connecting towns, cities, regions and countries. It means returning land privately enclosed by the rich and powerful to the public, to use for work, recreation and ecological restoration. It means food that is produced, distributed and consumed collectively, rather than for the profits of agribusiness. Such a vision can win majority support for a programme of rapid decarbonisation.
In his viral paper ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, Jem Bendell argues that we should take a three-pronged approach to the crisis.* He emphasises the need for resilience (psychological as well as material), the relinquishment of certain industries and consumption habits (along with other unsustainable elements of civilisation, such as living on coastlines) and the restoration of older ways of life, including rewilding, seasonal diets and non-electronic forms of play.
Bendell has been criticised for overstating the inevitability of social collapse, and his austere, primitivist conception of deep adaptation runs contrary to the mass appeal of a Green New Deal.† But he is right that adaptation has too often been neglected by the climate movement. We should take his intervention as a prompt to develop a socialist politics of adaptation that prioritises justice and is compatible with the optimism of the Green New Deal.
The 2019 report of the Civil Society Equity Review, ‘Can Climate Change-Fuelled Loss and Damage Ever Be Fair?’, proposed a number of adaptation measures in response to the inevitable impact of climate breakdown. These include: shifting away from intensive agribusiness, renewing mangroves and other forms of natural carbon sequestration, regulating new buildings to withstand future storms, building more flood defences, giving enforceable land rights to indigenous peoples, and tackling underlying social inequalities through technological and financial transfers and capacity building. Such measures could easily be integrated into plans for a Green New Deal.
As environmental impacts become more frequent and severe, measures to ensure equitable adaptation to climate breakdown must become just as central to the demands of climate movements as dismantling the fossil fuel industry and investing in renewable energy technologies. This means establishing that insurance, housing, food, energy, health and social care, education and emergency services are universal basic rights. We should demand the construction or repair of resilient infrastructure, regardless of cost, to protect those rights for anybody at risk. But this adaptation cannot be a new business venture for the same private interests which have profited from taking us this deep into climate crisis. Those at risk of climate impacts should guide the adaptation process through democratic control and public ownership of these services.
Delivering a rights and justice-centred programme of adaptation is obviously not a priority for governments representing the interests of those profiting from climate breakdown. Though we can make demands from opposition, eco-socialists must retain the goal of capturing state power: rather than abandoning conventional politics, we must learn how to buttress our influence by building a more diverse power base from below.
Extinction Rebellion and Youth Strikes have developed innovative models of organising, mobilising hundreds of thousands to push climate up the mainstream agenda. However, neither are organising their respective constituencies around an ideological project – XR is explicitly ‘beyond politics’. This is part of what explains their success: a plurality of people can identify with a movement that doesn’t contradict any of their core beliefs. Such movements are valuable in asserting the essential truth that the climate crisis is upon us, but they cannot provide alternatives to the current system. For socialists, there exists an opportunity to cohere these existing diverse movements around our own political vision. We should intervene to fill in the political space they create by popularising just climate solutions from our platforms in political parties and trade unions.
Socialists should also use the space created by these grassroots movements to conduct our own community organising. Building power locally will help win material gains and create a sense of possibility around the ambitions of a Green New Deal. For example, the Sheffield branch of ACORN built its base around tenants’ rights and is now campaigning to bring local buses into public ownership.
Each of us should take the initiative to identify where social and ecological needs are not being met and work with trusted comrades to fill those gaps. As well as building a diverse ecology of new eco-socialist organisations, it will be essential to restore the power and confidence of the traditional structures of working-class power: trade unions. Our aim should be for unions to treat issues of climate adaptation and just transition as worthy of industrial action.
The FBU is already calling on the government to give firefighters a statutory duty to respond to flooding; its general secretary Matt Wrack describes climate change as ‘an industrial matter today’. But a renaissance of working-class power through trade unions will only happen if people organise for it. Groups such as Momentum can play a vital role in redirecting the waning energy of Corbynism into the longer-term project of rebuilding trade union power.
This decade will be challenging for socialists, but our movement is the only one with the ideas and organisation to resolve the crises capitalism has birthed. In that, we find hope.
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* Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115/33, 14 August 2018.
† Leo Panitch, ‘A Decade on the Left’, Tribune, 7 March 2020.
* Jem Bendell, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, IFLAS Occasional Paper no. 2, 27 July 2018.
† Zing Tsjeng, ‘The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy’, Vice, 27 February 2019.