What should worry us about Greta Thunberg's climate crisis movement
The political economy of a solution to the climate crisis may well be as un-democratic as its causes. The self- and media-annointed climate change activist leader Greta Thunberg, who I suppose is more or less right, has made her case among other places to the global business and government leaders at the Davos Economic Forum.
The future undoubtedly includes electric cars, cities built more like New York, which depends on public transit, rather than Los Angeles, built for cars, with freeways and suburban private homes, and a mix of solar and nuclear energy replacing much of the world's current reliance on petroleum.
But what kind of social organization will result? Will it be more or less unequal and un-democratic?
If the outcomes are partly determined by the means used to reach them, then we can expect that the world of the future will be as unequal and un-democratic as it already is, or more so. Think many millions of people encircled in urban and semi-urban ghettoes where they are effectively under military occupation by their own governments. And a global information-driven economy that is integrated with governmental surveillance and policing. Environmentally, the world may survive but at the price of a degree of unfreedom our parents' generation would not have liked for one minute.
The appeal to change policy can only be directed at those with the political and economic power to change things, not the behaviors of individuals, who will use the tools and devices available to them to live their lives in the way that best maximizes their own economic and social utility. The changes needed are large-scale. If they are implemented, it will be because of decisions by governments taken in concert with private industry.
The world's leaders may solve the climate crisis using, and while keeping, the same political economy of big capitalism that we have. Certainly, that is what they will want to do.
They will likely also impose new moralities. We saw this as early as the 1970s with the ecology movement. Lots of middle class people began to get the idea that the world's problems will only and best be solved if everyone buys and right products and uses and discards them (through recycling) in the right way. This indicates governance from above with the aid of populist myths.
The real function of that political morality will be to aid the governments and the corporations that they work with, which will find ways of profiting on new opportunities, whether it is the building of solar panels in deserts or electric automobiles or even airplanes, if that is ever possible (thus saving the possibility of air travel continuing to be available to the world's middle class, even if in regions like continental Europe train travel is made central instead, perhaps through relative pricing schemes, with air travel being restricted to business and government professionals whose time is especially valuable).
Nothing in the likely ways of addressing the climate crisis suggests that the solutions will be highly egalitarian, democratic, or liberty-preserving or enhancing.
But, you ask, isn't capitalism really the problem? Yes and no. Industrial societies dependent on high rates of economic growth have been the problem. Those societies have been capitalist or socialist, they have been bureaucratic and centralized, their economic systems were not democratic, and they involve heavy industry. Which may or may not be highly polluting or have other negative consequences. If capitalism itself is the problem, it is only because industrial economies dependent on economic development and growth are the problem.
Today's economy is increasingly centered around information, and the energy it needs is mainly electricity, which can be generated without fossil fuels or pollution. But this economy is capitalist.
Politics and morality are distinct in the modern world. Too many activists operate by reducing politics to morality. In our individual relationships, we cannot solve the world's ecological problems, or its social ones, like racial segregation and inequality. Individually, people try to get by, get the things they need, and if they are lucky, do the things they like to do, and do the right thing by the people around them. They may think being kind to their foreign neighbors and recycling the containers their food comes packaged in is the key to changing the world, but the scope of action of individuals is very limited unless it involves the loud appeals to the powerful through forms of visible public protest. If we all were free of prejudices towards our neighbors, that itself would not stop the police and military forces from being employed to keep people in line in terms of the needs of capital and governments constrained by its logic. Similarly, modifying how much paper you use will not help to save the rain forests from depletion, though if you started a mass movement by publicly doing so it might. Macro-economic problems need large-scale solutions. In relationship to the macro-processes, the significance of what individuals do is mostly ideological, a way that people help the systems run by elites manage us.
There is another global crisis, whose causes and possible solutions are not identical to the climate crisis but of course do overlap it. This is a crisis of social control (of the power of labor, consumer activity, and payments by debtors -- which is how most of us figure in the world's economy; this is what we are to capital) -- versus the desire for democracy.
Capitalism increasingly is tending away from democracy. Greta Thunberg has no solution to this problem. Further, the climate crisis has fairly clear dimensions and solutions, while the crisis of democracy under state capitalism does not, at least yet. There, we can assess the problems, but we don't know exactly to solve them.
You and I do not, our corporate business world does not, Greta Thunberg doesn't, President Biden doesn't, and even the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member, is interested in solving the problem but doesn't have the solution, any more than any set of persons in the world of science and scholarship does. It's true that the approach to some of these problems of various world leaders can be divided between those who recognize and have the desire to solve them and those who do not. That's a very useful distinction, since identifying a problem and wanting to solve it is one necessary and important part of solving it.
A link is that while global warming may make the continued life of our species on this planet impossible (even if a few of the super-rich can one day escape to a colony on Mars, the moon, or somewhere else), the crisis of policing or social control in the interest of capital versus the desire for the liberty, equality, and solidarity of the democratic idea may make the continued life of our species on this planet highly undesirable for many people.
It may not be known whether an effective solution to the climate problem will be more achievable or better if the changes made go along with a movement to more rather than less democracy, but it is certain that addressing that problem along with it would inspire many people to hope.
We don't know what a post-capitalist world will look like. We can want, and say we want, a future that accords with a vision of plentiful goods that people want (which might be mostly things that everyone can have, like access to high quality entertainment, rather than things they cannot, like shoreline mansions, yachts, private jets, and personal servants) and a sustainable natural environment.
Problems that have to do with our relationship to the natural environment and various threats are the kinds of problems that are solved with technologies. New technologies are implemented large-scale.
The attendant popular moralities should be treated as the marketing gimmick they are. The world's most troubling and dangerous problems may not be the ones global elites can solve. Left to themselves, capitalists and governments will try to give people what they want, which will be in the nature of consumer goods and their informational equivalents, while keeping them under control.
Intuitively, the more desperate the situation appears to be to the world's leaders and the populaces whose opinions are shaped in the medias, the more likely it is that the solutions that are imposed, and they can only be found, imposed, and implemented, a fact that in itself is at best indifferent to the extent of liberty or democracy, will be highly repressive. To what can this be compared? Perhaps to a war that a government must treat as requiring that it make various demands on its citizenry. Austerity, policing, maybe even (more) concentration (refugee, relocation, unneeded persons, etc.) camps and massacres.
The vision of most of the climate activists is too narrow.
The missing concept is not democracy, liberty, solidarity, or any other of the extant political ideals. The missing concept is what threatens all of them, and what, in its current direction, also threatens all of us environmentally and climactically. This concept is capitalism.
It may be because Greta Thunberg and her movement do not directly target capitalism, or even our current increasingly anti-democratic forms of it, as the problem that she is the figure head of the cause for the more forward-thinking of our elites. Obviously, the long-term interests of capitalism, though not the short-term interests of every corporation or government, require solving the climate problem. They will have to solve it well enough to stay in business. The danger is that they will do only that. It is better than denying the problem, but it is still not good enough.
The new austerity and its forms of policing and social control will be imposed with some amount of invocation of fear. I fear that the danger this indicates will be ignored, buried by the general panic, such that the problems the panic itself are part of will necessarily go unrecognized.
Is it not obvious that the Chinese model, that of a government by expert professionals who are knowledgeable and exercise good judgment in solving problems of technical and social management, with little regard to civil liberties and no need for democracy, a model that has allowed that country to open up concentration camps (which do not kill but coercively pretend to re-educate) for its most worrisome national/ethnic and religious minority, that this model is entirely compatible with the prospect of government and business leaders finding a set of solutions to the climate crisis and imposing them on us from above?
If the defining political question of the next generation is the climate crisis, the defining question that will emerge in its wake is already with us, and quite visibly, almost everywhere.
This problem is that of democracy versus capitalism.
There is no form fo government in the world today that in itself provides a model for solving this problem. The dominantly popular political model in the world today is that of the United States, based on a vision of governance limited by internally oppositional forces and civil liberties, and a citizenry that is entitled to equality of status and recognition (hence, our identity politics and the drive, perfectly compatible with a capitalist logic, to identify and conquer new territories of unrecognized marginal social types with their respective identity claims). This model has in fact failed most noisily in safeguarding our individual liberties in the face of a corporate state whose power over people extends far beyond what the revolutionaries in our own revolt of colonists could have imagined. The other dominant model is the French one of popular sovereignty, which allows for a stronger state that is actually both more provident and less repressive for its concern more with equality than liberty. Today neither the socialist idea nor that of liberty seems adequate. These are the dominant models that shape the search for alternatives, while the Chinese model of governance is beginning to seem the most likely winner in facts on the ground. The Chinese system is based on a bargain with the populace: we will give you more consumer goods in a theoretically unlimitedly expanding economy, but in return we will control your lives, and you will neither have much say in how you are governed nor much liberty to think and criticize, apart from the entrepreneurial liberties needed for development. The Chinese and other more authoritarian and highly centralized governments managed the covid problem better than the wealthier Western societies whose populace’s concerns with liberty made them proceed more cautiously. What doubt can there be that the Chinese model of government is a better one for solving global warming? Sometimes the most difficult problems are those that lie within the solutions to other problems.
It seems all too obvious and simple to point out that the worst practices of governments and corporations could be altered by the right kind of democratic government making decisions about what these organizations should do. Democratic socialists are surely right about this basic point: if we want to change how our governments police, manage, and incarcerate or throw away into zones of abandonment (like the world’s camps of refugees and unwanted persons), this can only be done by causing our governments to make particular decisions that move things in better directions, and not only by regulatory laws limiting the scope of powers of various public and private institutions. Otherwise, it is all the more certain that we face a future in which governments are effectively at war against many of their own citizens. The climate crisis itself probably has more and less democratic solutions. One thing we do know for certain is that right now the same set of forces seem aligned to make our planet both impossible to continue living on, and unattractive as a place to be while we are living on it.