Climate change: 'Rising chance' of exceeding 1.5C global target:
There have been a lot of dire articles like this lately, and I find it truly frightening. The ruling class and capital are essentially driving us full speed off a cliff. Working people are the only ones that can slam on the brakes, but our means of subsistence is tied to the car going full speed, making that a difficult choice to make in the short-term while we figure out how to design a whole new car. The car represents the economy, and the brakes are any means of pressuring systemic change needed to slow or stop the rise of CO2 levels, electoral pressure, strikes, slow downs, etc. And the car has to be divested of fossil fuels and not be dependent upon perpetual growth without stalling (crises).
As Frederick Engels observes in Anti-Duhring, "both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself [including everything from cyclical economic crises and inequality to environmental degradation and accelerated climate change], and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place." And so, like Karl Kautsky warns in The Class Struggle, "As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism."
Coincidentally, I was also listening to NPR today and the subject of the TED Radio hour happened to be "A Century of Money," starting with Kathleen Day's "What Can The 1929 Crash Teach Us About The 2020's Economic Crisis?" and ending with Abigail Disney's "How Can Corporations Treat Their Lowest-Paid Employees Better?" And the frustrating part was that they get so tantalizingly close to the reality and the required solutions, but then they fall way short. For example, near the end of Abigail's TED talk, the host asks, "[W]e've had now a century of these lessons. Do you think we need another moment where we have a reckoning and say, you know, we need to fix the system; let's set up a better way of doing this?" And Abigail's answer is, "What I say is they're humans working in your company, human beings. They have all the same needs and desires that you have. You have to treat them with the dignity you would want to be treated with yourself. Like, that's just the starting point. Then go make all the profit you want to make. But if your business plan starts with exploitation and you can't make - get to profitability without doing that, then you need to go get another business plan."
One problem with this is that the logic of capitalism doesn't work that way, and in fact, it often works better precisely due to increased exploitation of labour, giving the capitalist class more profits to accumulate, more to share with shareholders, and more to speculate with and transform into more money. And this logic also gives them a greater say in the political sphere due to the superior social power their wealth and economic influence grants them, meaning laws and taxes and legal enforcement through the judicial system often favour the employer over the employee, the rich over the poor, etc. And the morality that capitalism engenders, in turn, favours the employers and the wealthy as the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. So if you're rich, it's because you work hard and make good decisions and have earned it, while if you're poor it's due to your laziness and bad decisions. Or think of the disparity in the way wealth is redistributed and how we treat the recipients—one example being the way corporate subsidies are relatively easy to get and not questioned in the same way as social welfare, whereas government welfare for individuals (e.g., SNAP benefits, Section 8 vouchers, etc.) is looked down upon and often difficult for people to get.
So when Abigail gives her earlier moral appeal to CEOs like Bezos when she says, "So what I want to see happen is if I'm a CEO and I know that some of my workers are on food stamps or going to food pantries, I want to be ashamed of myself. I want other people to feel shame on my behalf. The fact that that's not happening says that the CEO considers himself to be of a class and even a species different and distinct from the people who do the hardest work at the company," she's close to the mark as they ARE a distinct class from working people. However, it falls short because moral appeals carry little weight in the face of the immense influence of the logic of capitalism on behaviour and social relations. This logic not only gives rise to these class distinctions and socioeconomic inequality [conditioning capital to accumulate wealth and exploit labour], but also views the success of the wealthy as a moral good. And no amount of shame on the behalf of a single person can overcome the determination of the logic of the entire system, the desire of shareholders, or the effects of cyclical economic crises that are created but contradictions internal to the way capitalism functions.
In essence, people at least see and understand that there's a problem and that people are suffering immensely between these periods of prosperity, and some even within them. And during the Depression, the changes that took place, including things like the legalization of unions and collective bargaining, banking deposit protections, and the New Deal works projects, were a direct result of the growing rise of labour activism, strikes, unions, and the organization or working people and the poor by socialists and communists. Things were so dire, the ruling class and corporate leaders were afraid of a political and economic revolution. And these measures, along with the destruction of both Asian and European means of production and a thinning of the working class during WWII, allowed the American working class to prosper like never before. Except those measure were a temporary fix to a problem that arises from contradictions inherent to the system itself, i.e., capital's need to exploit labour to produce profit, the need for continual growth to avoid economic downturns, the coercive pressures for capital to accumulate (creating inequality and the tendency towards monopolization), the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time due to increases in technology and productivity, cyclical crises caused by things like overproduction and the inability of capital to function as capital, the contradiction between use value and exchange value, etc. And this doesn't even touch upon the ways the need for perpetual growth and the political power of capital has irreparably harmed our environment.
Altogether, the way capitalism functions can be tweaked to make things slightly better (at least temporarily), and things like higher taxes on the wealthy, regulations, and other government policies can help stem some of the gross inequality that we see, as New Deal programs and policies show. However, they can't fundamentally change the way that capitalism functions, nor can that put working people on equal footing with employers and capital, because the latter always has the final say. Capitalist property rights give capital the final say over the workplace and the share of the fruits of the labour that the labourer themselves actually receive (wages) because capital owns the means of production, the labourer's labour-time, and everything that it produces.
Until we devise an economic system that isn't forced to operate on a model of continual growth and that gives working people real ownership of their own labour and its fruits, along with truly democratic institutions of decision-making, we will be forced to endure at least this gross level of socioeconomic inequality, recurrent economic crises, a distant and disinterested ruling class, and the worst case scenario of a looming climate catastrophe. And no amount of moral shaming will change that. (Plus, it's hard to shame a person who has the ability to do whatever they want and even fly themselves into space at a whim.) But time is running out, and I think the Spanish Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, is absolutely correct when he writes in his conclusion to "The limits to growth: eco-socialism or barbarism" that:
Taking up these challenges will not be a matter of simple political prescription. Once again, nor will it be a question of winning arguments. Rather, it will be to do with the ability to put together broad social and political alliances able to prepare the ground for a whole historical and social block to emerge. Local initiatives and global proposals, classical traditions, and new ways of thinking, along with social and institutional action, must play a part in this broad community, in an exercise to build a social fabric feeding on imagery and looking towards a horizon of peace, justice, equality and social rights within the planetary boundaries.
In the past, the idea of an alternative – socialism or barbarism – was popularized by Rosa Luxemburg against the bellicose backdrop of the First World War. The traditional Marxist conception of the time theorized that capitalism was at such an advanced stage of development – in its imperialist phase – that the only thing that could come out of it was international socialist revolution or the destruction of every trace of civilization under the yoke of the war and its consequences. In a way, there were indeed revolutions and a lot of destruction. Not only Europe but the whole world was devastated by two World Wars and totalitarian regimes, while those turbulent times swept away millions of human beings, including Rosa Luxemburg herself, assassinated in 1919 during the Spartacist uprising.
Presently, that alternative is perfectly valid. Human civilization, any civilization, can only build horizons of justice and well-being if it can find a way to do so within the planetary boundaries. Fitting within or readjusting to those boundaries, if we may put it like that, can happen in either an organized or a chaotic manner, the worst-case scenario being ecological collapse. Any of the intermediate scenarios will in any event oblige us to reorganize ourselves through other rules. But we must not forget that the politics striving hardest to prevail in these situations of emergency and collapse is that of authoritarianism, discrimination, inequality, and militarism. It is, once again, barbarism. To avoid it, we must open an alternative road based on other principles and values, democracy, human rights and social justice. This is the route towards eco-socialism. It is therefore a matter of choosing between eco-socialism or barbarism.
