The facts on climate change demand a radical solution

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4 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2015 “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Cli­ mate”, by Naomi Klein, 566 pages, Knopf Canada, Sep­ tember, 2014. T ronto-based journalist, author, and activist, may he latest book of Naomi Klein, the influential To­ live up to its ambitious title, “This Changes Every­ thing.” In it, Klein turns her thorough, eye-opening brand of investigative journalism to the topic of cli­ mate change. The book is a surprising achievement for a mainstream author. Her call for a new grassroots movement to rise up and defeat neoliberalism and halt climate change has been publicized on television and in bookstores across Canada and around the world.

Klein provides an insightful synopsis of the envi­ ronmental movement. She shows how many of the grassroots protest organizers of the 1970s morphed into a layer of institutionalized green bureaucrats. She exposes how these people and groups traded off their willingness to confront exploitative industries for the power and prestige associated with the business class, claiming that they would reform it from the in­ side. This took the form of measly pro-market mecha­ nisms, like the trade in carbon credits.

She explains how we got to where we are today in environmental politics, particularly with the rise of (continued from page 1: “President Obama’s lame duck quackery”)

November 2016.

In his SOTU, the president sounded a bit like Reagan proclaiming “it’s morn­ ing in America again,” as he asserted that we have moved beyond the “shadow of crisis.” He hailed the Labor Department report showing that more jobs were cre­ ated in 2014 than in any other year of this century. The statistics cited are ac­ curate, and undoubtedly the job situa­ tion has improved over the depths of the Great Recession. But this partial picture ignores serious lingering problems.

Even The Wall Street Journal observed that the report was “marred by softer wages and a rise in workforce dropouts.” There are still nearly 18 million workers who want full-time jobs but can’t find one. And that doesn’t include millions more who have simply given up looking for work and are no longer being tracked. It was only these “dropouts” that have brought the official unemployment rate to 5.6 percent—down from the Recession peak of 10 percent.

For the second time in 2014, average wages actually declined in December. The average worker wage is lower today than when Obama took office. The president acknowledged the growth in inequality during “recovery.” Choosing not to jaw Tony Savino / Socialist Action bone about his $10.10 minimum wage proposal, he instead advocated boosting taxes on both wealth and income of the rich while giving tax breaks to the “mid­ dle class.”

Such help for what has been his party’s historic base includes modest tax writeoffs for child care and what has been ex­ aggerated as “free” community college education. These proposals have been cheered at the pep rallies on the road— anti-scientific climate change denial in the United States. Klein’s investigation into climate politics re­ veals the necessity of systemic economic change. She shares alarming anecdotes. One involves the Nature Conservancy’s stating that it had no choice but to al­ low drilling for oil in its own nature reserves.

She exposes the myth of environmental salvation de­ livered by green corporations and billionaire philan­ thropists. A prominent example is Richard Branson. His Virgin airlines releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, notwithstanding his empty promise to shift to renewable energy. Her revelations highlight how futile it is to try to fight climate change without fighting the capitalist establishment that created it.

Klein also illustrates how dire the struggle for cli­ mate justice is for the Global South. She shows how rising sea levels are reaching crisis levels for those liv­ ing on coastlines and islands, where poverty and envi­ ronmental strife combine to create a crushing burden on the victims of First World consumerism and waste­ ful overproduction of useless things.

She also reveals the global injustice that developing countries face in terms of economic goals. After cen­ turies of exploitation by imperialism, many of them want to enjoy the high level of industrial sophistica­ tion of the dominant countries, but face pressure not to industrialize in the same unsustainable way.

In this way, even the environmental movement (in but are dead on arrival in Congress.

The president did reach out to the Republicans in one area sure to get bipartisan support and likely ac­ tion—so-called Fast Track approval for negotiating further global eco­ nomic pacts. This was the one topic the president’s most loyal of all sup­ porters—the bureaucracy atop our unions—had to criticize.

With characteristic bluntness, Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said, “The progressive plans proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union will do noth­ ing to help the poor or the middle class if ‘fast track’ legislation and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal are passed by Congress. ... ‘Fast track’ is just another name for the corrupt and undemocratic process that has been used to ram destructive trade deals through Congress; deals that have led to a systematic elimina­ tion of good jobs, have devastated our communities, and degraded our stan­ dard of living for the last 30 years.”

And what about the over-arching crisis for not just the United States but our en­ tire planet—climate change? The presi­ dent devoted four brief paragraphs to the greatest challenge humanity has yet faced. He took some pot shots at globalwarming deniers and said, “The Penta­ gon says that climate change poses im­ mediate risks to our national security. We In the end, unfortunately, Klein does not present a vision of the future post-climate-change society. The crux of her argument, that climate change can be de­ feated only by an all-encompassing movement from the disempowered, is not incorrect. The problem lies in what kind of programme and leadership this move­ ment requires, what it should aim for, and how it will succeed.

Part of crafting a solution is properly identifying the root of the problem. Even though capitalism is singled out in the title, it is disappointing to find it hyphen­ ated throughout the book: free market-capitalism, unregulated-capitalism, etc. This is a common reflex of reformists—to give this rotten economic system an escape clause: call for an end to the current era of capitalism in order to return to the illusory “good ol’ days” capitalism.

Thus, despite all the evidence condemning the capi­ talist system and its propensity to plunder the envi­ ronment for private gain, Klein stops short of bring­ ing the reader to the logical conclusion: a new mode of production is needed to stave off catastrophe and to build a better world. Instead of advocating a revo­ lutionary perspective, she dismisses it with a carica­ ture—a “violent vanguardist revolution” that nobody wants.

She points to the abolition of slavery as an example of when a massive, morally repugnant system was dismantled, while leaving the capitalist mode of pro­ duction intact. But, as the American Civil War demon­ strated, the ruling class rarely surrenders its “right” to exploit without a fight. The subtitle of Klein’s book, “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” alludes to a fight. Klein seems to forget, though, that this is a final match. There can be only one winner. n should act like it.”

But the only “action” mentioned was the joint statement with the Chinese gov­ ernment made during an intermission in trade negotiations that he puffed up as a “historic announcement”—a scam we analyzed in some detail in a November Socialist Action article.

A socialist response to SOTU The only socialist currently holding elected office in the United States is Seat­ tle city council member Kshama Sawant. While having some political differences with her Socialist Alternative party, So­ cialist Action endorsed her election cam­ paign and has been supportive of her role in minimum-wage movement victories that have meant substantial raises for tens of thousands of low-wage workers in her city.

On the night of SOTU she gave a per­ ceptive video and written response to the president that was picked up on the Common Dreams site. She concluded, “We need to build our own political voice, a mass political party for working people. ... We must work to build independent movements of working-class people … to challenge the domination of the 1%. Soli­ darity!”

Recalling the idiom of my Sixties youth— right on, sister Kshama! While respecting our own nuanced differences, socialists will play a vital role in reviving working-class unity in action. n

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Mark Colman