WHEN I STARTED WRITING THIS, NEW YORK CITY HAD JUST COME OFF its second punishing heat wave in three weeks. It broke with violent thunderstorms that prompted flash flood warnings from the Weather Service, spiced up with advice to those in low-lying areas to head to higher ground. Not two years ago, we had tornadoes that took down trees all over my neighborhood. Isn’t this sort of thing supposed to happen in Kansas, not Brooklyn? Except that Kansas was in the midst of a huge, crop-destroying drought driving up food prices around the world.
The climate crisis has become part of daily life. It’s no longer merely an abstraction of scientists’ computer models—you can feel it when you walk out the door or when you shop for food.
But it’s not only climate crisis that’s becoming familiar. As I write this, the financial crisis that broke out in the summer of 2007 is about to celebrate yet another birthday. In the United States, the real economy began falling apart less than half a year later. We’ve officially been in recovery since mid-2009, but it hardly feels like it to most of us. This is clearly no mere cyclical affair, but a deep structural crisis of overindebtedness and profound maldistribution of income. Nor is it an American problem. Although the crisis broke out here, the epicenter has moved to Europe, whose neoliberal strategy centered on the euro project—in no small part an attempt to emulate the American model of looser regulation and “flexible” labor markets—is in collapse. In both New World and Old, the political system looks paralyzed in the face of the collapse, unable even to imagine a way out.
So, to paraphrase that remarkably banal phrase popularized by Alice Walker, these are the crises many of us have been waiting for. Weren’t these the sort of crises that were supposed to wake up the somnolent masses and shock them into transformative political action? They haven’t. What have they done? The maniacs that Richard Hofstadter wrote about in The Paranoid Style in American Politics—the ones who thought that Eisenhower was a socialist—now own a major party and a highly rated TV network. In Europe, social democratic parties impose austerity programs, only to be defeated by right-wing parties that do the same. Outside the mainstream, in the United States, the Occupy movement sprang up and then dissipated. In Europe, there have been numerous and inspiring demonstrations in Spain and Greece—though not in Ireland—yet the austerity programs, authored in Brussels and Frankfurt, roll on. On neither continent does anyone pay much attention to the unfolding climate catastrophe.
Catastrophe can be paralyzing, not mobilizing. Revolutionaries should be talking about possibilities of transformation, not spinning tales of great chaos and suffering. That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of chaos and suffering in life. But looking to epochal quantities of both as the shocks that will awaken the masses out of their somnolence is not promising.
Hard economic times often don’t help the good guys. In the United States, everyone thinks of the 1930s and the Flint factory occupations and gets weirdly nostalgic for the Depression. But the slump of the 1970s brought reaction. The “solution” to stagflation became Thatcher, Volcker, and Reagan. The right has done rather well in the current economic crisis too. In Europe, the 1930s—the decade of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini—weren’t at all kind to the left either.
On the contrary, good times are often better for the political strength of the masses. As Sasha Lilley says in her essay in this volume, “With the exception of the 1930s, periods of intense working class combativeness in the United States have tended to coincide with periods of economic expansion, not contraction and crisis. The two big strike waves of the early twentieth century, from 1898 to 1904 and 1916 to 1920, took place during years of growth.” Some of the most intense political ferment in the world today—like factory and land occupations—is in China, which has been booming for decades.
The boss knows that there’s nothing like a rise in unemployment to stifle militancy. This point was strongly made by the Polish Marxist economist Michal Kalecki in his great essay “Political Aspects of Full Employment”:
Under a regime of permanent full employment, the “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension…. “Discipline in the factories” and “political stability” are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the “normal” capitalist system.1
The bourgeoisie may understand the uses of crisis better than we do.
I can certainly understand the temptation of catastrophism. Faced with a population largely numb to environmental and economic disaster, one longs for some dramatic external intervention to do the work that conventional political agitation can’t. So: the banking system will collapse utterly and people will finally wake up to the fact that the whole money and credit system is a sham and has been for at least a hundred years. Or we’re going to run out of cheap oil, and the whole carbon-based energy system will collapse, and we’ll all have to resort to growing food in our backyards (if you have a backyard, that is—and if you don’t, that’s probably your fault for living in an overpopulated, inauthentic city when you should really be scratching tubers out of the soil).
It’s striking how much these doomy fantasies have in common with traditional right-wing thought. For decades, the right has denounced fiat money—a credit-based system organized around the state—as a crime against God and Nature, since the only “real” money is gold. As John Maynard Keynes put it, gold is “part of the apparatus of conservatism.”2 Curiously, a good bit of the left (you could find adherents around Zuccotti Park in late 2011, with their Ron Paul and End the Fed signs) has picked up on some of the analysis without embracing the rest of the apparatus—austerity and upper class power—that gold figures so centrally in.
The intellectual origin of population-decimating scenarios of ecological doom is that world-historical reactionary, Thomas Malthus. Engels described Malthus’s vision as “the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair.”3 To that, many an environmental catastrophist would counter that Malthus had it right, even if he was a little ahead of his time.
But Engels was right. Catastrophism is a counsel of despair. James Davis has a lot more to say on that topic in his contribution to this volume, but I’ll just note this: its native terrain is the right, which is all about natural limits (rather than social ones), great chains of being (with God at the top and the poor at the bottom, enjoying the suffering that is their lot in life), and punishments meted out for our sinful ways. Engels was writing from a position of revolutionary optimism that viewed scarcity and crisis as symptoms of a bad social organization that human intelligence and will could transform into something much better.
That sort of revolutionary optimism sounds quaint today. With the collapse of the USSR, we’ve not merely lost faith in transformative political projects, we often view them with fear: today’s revolutionary will be in charge of tomorrow’s firing squad, so let’s junk ambition. Instead, it’s as if many of us—and by “us” I mean those who long for a more peaceful, egalitarian society—project our transformative fantasies onto nature, but in a perversely destructive way. Nature will punish us for our ambition—” industrial society,” the longing for material abundance, the urge to move beyond the small and local—by forcing us back to some hunter-gatherer purity, whether we like it or not. Short of that, there’s always conventional financial collapse and pandemic economic ruin.
This sensibility is nicely captured by A.R. Ammons, in his book-length poem Sphere:
man waited
75,000 years in a single cave (cold, hunger, inexplicable visitation of disease) only to rise to the bright, complex
knowledge of his destruction!4
Back to the cave!
So what can we set against this catastrophist trend? Or, as Eddie Yuen asks in his essay, “What narrative strategies are most likely to generate effective and radical social movements?” The question does make me a little nervous—it contains the temptation to follow George Lakoff down the road of “framing” and ignore the role of social power and inherited “common sense” in making some narratives more powerful than others. It’s not just about coming up with a good story. Yes, Frank Luntz is a rhetorical genius for coming up with terms like “death tax,” but there’s also the centuries of money power in the United States that give the phrase more than rhetorical heft.
But narratives are important. Let’s muse on one of the more famous exhortations in political history: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It sounds quaint, almost embarrassing. It draws on structures of feeling that are looking pretty withered today: a notion of broad class solidarity and a sense that, once mobilized, this united class could transform the world into a better place. We’re suspicious of solidarity because it erases “difference” and because we fear that it might universalize the perspective of the demographically dominant (e.g., educated white men). And we fear the transformation because of the firing squads (see above).
So instead, many radicals embrace small-scale efforts—the allegedly prefigurative little societies of the various Occupy encampments (which couldn’t survive the police raids), or little co-ops, or any number of other tentative experiments in the interstices of the present. The question of scale is always elided. How could these little things organize complex production and distribution for millions? How do we get those millions to play along with these experiments, given the distractions of daily life? And what precisely is the broad narrative appeal of DIY encampments when what people want to do is eat decently and be able to get their teeth fixed?
Not that it’s easy to imagine mobilizing a large share of the population to an agenda that would mitigate the damage to the climate, much less reverse course in the future. Some on the left emphasize the responsibility of corporations for environmental ruin, which is true in part; there’s no corner that a profit-seeking entity won’t cut if it can get away with it. But getting serious about producing less carbon means that the cost of gasoline will have to rise, and Americans hate expensive gas. It would require different settlement patterns—less sprawl, less wasteful travel. It would mean living very differently. Strange weather might make people nervous, but they still have to drive to get to work if they’ve got a job that requires it. In a world with over a billion motor vehicles in use, how do you develop a constituency for driving less, or very differently? It’s not easy to conjure up an answer. So it’s tempting to think that catastrophe will force that constituency into being.
A variation of this approach in the economic realm, heard from many varieties of radical, is to claim that capitalism has no way out of this crisis. Catastrophe is upon us, and short of radical action, things can only get worse. Of course things could always get worse. It’d be foolish to say they couldn’t. But capital typically finds its way out of crisis, otherwise the vast growth we’ve seen—global real income was up 13,637 percent between 1700 (just before the opening shots of the Industrial Revolution) and 2008—couldn’t have happened.5 Maybe it’s different this time, and maybe capitalism has reached its ecological limits so no recovery will be possible. It seems an unwise bet, given the system’s resilience and capacity to turn so many unimaginable things to profit centers. It could be a very ugly capitalism, reinforced with intensified state violence. Actually, given the intense repression that greeted mild Occupy protests, you could say that that’s already happening.
But it doesn’t seem fruitful to argue that there’s no way to save the earth without ending capitalism. I would dearly love to end capitalism, but any strategy to reverse the despoilment of nature will have to happen before the system of private ownership can be transformed. It’s possible that the development of those strategies—things like regulations, limits on the freedom to invest, the development and promotion of new energy sources—could help the work of transforming private ownership, but even under the best of circumstances it’s hard to imagine getting the whole job done.
Mobilizing arguments about inevitable fates or cul-de-sacs without exit can demoralize more than they can rouse to action. If the climate can’t be saved unless everything else is transformed, will that get people off their couches? Isn’t the temptation, on hearing about an inevitable climate catastrophe, to mutter, “Why bother?” Why not just turn up the AC until the water’s around your ankles? Or, to quote another bit from the Ammons poem I cited earlier:
when one knows he’s going out, can we
blame him for shoving the voltage up?6
Wouldn’t it be better to spin narratives of how humans are marvelously resourceful creatures who could do a lot better with the intellectual, social, and material resources we have? That new collectivities could together make a world better than the capitalist mess we’ve inherited? As someone who finds the temptation of pessimism too alluring, I keep reminding myself that recovering a utopian sensibility is about the most practical thing we could do right now. Dystopia is for losers.