Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world
2022; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12596
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
ResumoIn the next few decades, it is possible that all we talk about will be the weather. Nowadays, the discussion on climate change tends to be about the effects of it on our landscape and living conditions, on whom to blame, and how best to mitigate it. These discussions are becoming stale. We all know where it comes from, what it does, and how to stop it—but we are stuck in a political and social-economic order that makes it nearly impossible to change anything in a serious way without a radical shift of priorities. One way to get out of this deadlock is to rethink the problem both morally and politically. The subfield of climate ethics has been mostly concerned with two issues: (1) what principles of justice should underlie negotiations between states over how best to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects (Caney, 2005, 2014; Bell, 2010; Gardiner, 2004; Jamieson, 1992, 2005; Moellendorf, 2015; Shue, 2014), and (2) to what extent do individuals have moral duties to change their own behavior to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005; Jamieson, 2010; Hiller, 2011; Schwenkenbecher, 2014; Cripps, 2013; Fragnière, 2016; Godoy, 2017). While interesting, these questions fail to address the novel moral challenges that climate change places on human beings in the present. By temporally and spatially disassembling cause and effect, perpetrator and victim, as well as intention and action, climate change challenges conventional normative accounts of what it means to be a person, that is, to be accountable to others, to be responsible for harm, to be blameworthy, even to have choices that matter (Gardiner, 2006, 2011; Jamieson, 2014; Page, 1999). Rawlsian, utilitarian, and Kantian ethical frameworks are not enough; we need a new way of thinking the human under conditions of climate catastrophe (Jonas, 1984), one sensitive to our dependence on particular ecological parameters for human flourishing, parameters currently being destroyed in the so-called "Anthropocene." The buzzword of the "Anthropocene" has been circulating through social theory like a wildfire ever since a few stratigraphers proposed this term in the 2000s to mark a new geological epoch, one defined by the markings of human beings on the very sediment of the planet (Steffen et al., 2007). A few critical theorists (Malm & Hornborg, 2014) have pushed back against the use of term, arguing that it wrongly identifies all of humanity, that is, Man as such, for irreversible destroying the ecological parameters of the Holocene epoch. Is the human species as a whole really the agent of this ruin, as some claim, or does it make sense to categorially distinguish different kinds of human relationships to nature within the species, and if so, what is the criterion for such distinctions? That is to say, what are we to make of clashing epistemological, metaphysical, and anthropological perspectives toward the environment when judging the validity of the Anthropocene concept? Along with Malm and Hornborg (2014), I believe that an antagonistic theory of the development of human social relations refutes any generalization of universal species attributes in regards to the environment. And yet, contrary to them, there is still a room for a philosophical theory of the Anthropocene, not as a causal-empirical account of human domination of the ecosystem, but as normative account of what it means to live together on a fragile planet. But how can we act together in the Anthropocene, given the status of permanent crisis, emergency, and catastrophe? There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival (Klein, 2019a; Parenti, 2011; Taylor, 2019). I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. This article has two parts: the first is a critique of the narrowness of climate ethics, and the second is a contribution to climate politics. The aim in the first half is to show the deep connection between the fossil economy and climate change, a structural connection which renders individual market-based solutions not only inadequate, but ideological. Here, I am mostly building on other ecological Marxists, and criticizing some tendencies in climate ethics. In the second half of the article, I move up a level of analysis and focus on the various political-economic conjunctures of state action and capitalist dynamics that are emerging in response to climate change. Based on a reading of Mann and Wainwright's Climate Leviathan (2018) alongside some recent comments by Naomi Klein (2019a), I argue that we should take more seriously a hybrid political form of adaptation to climate change which fully accepts its brutal reality, but denies any form of solidarity in response. By conceptually clarifying this possibility as a real threat, we will hopefully be more prepared to identify it in the future, so as to avoid it. Climate change presents us with the largest "collective action problem" in human history (Gardiner, 2011).11 On why climate change should not be thought of as a collective action problem, see Mann and Wainwright (2018), pp. 103–108, and Aklin and Mildenberger (2020). Anthropogenic climate change—including global warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, and increased extreme weather events—is the product of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, as well as mass deforestations over the last 200 years, primarily by industrialized, rich countries (Shue, 1993; Maslin, 2014; IPCC, 2014, 2018). Individuals in rich countries, and especially rich individuals in rich countries, are disproportionately responsible for a huge amount of carbon emissions, historically and currently. Their giant carbon footprints are results of wasteful consumer choices (see the articles in Gardiner et al., 2010). Half of the carbon in the atmosphere today was put there in the last 30 years, mostly serving the demand of wealthy citizens of the global north (Ritchie & Roser, 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019). The use of fossil fuels to energize our planet—especially through the burning of coal, oil, and gas—is the primary driver of the explosive rise in carbon dioxide emissions (Maslin, 2014). To maintain a livable planet without catastrophic losses, the rise in global temperature should be kept to 1.5°C, or 2°C maximum (IPCC, 2014, 2018). But given the emissions trajectory we are on right now, such targets are nearly impossible. Nevertheless, most policy makers, economists, and philosophers believe that the most realistic, efficient, and effective strategy to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts is to implement a fair carbon tax, to cap and trade emissions on the global market, to incentivize individuals to consume ecological products, to give credits for businesses to develop and use sustainable technologies, to pool resources to fund adaptation projects worldwide, and to push for more public investment in green jobs (Stern, 2008; Broome, 2012; United Nations, 2015; Ocasio-Cortez, 2019). Now, most of this is true, but none of it is very helpful in solving the climate crisis. Why? This common framing of the problem—as one of consumer choices and carbon footprints, individual emissions and carbon taxes, collective action problems and market solutions—fails to consider any structural drivers of climate change as rooted in our economic form of life. It assumes that one can separate the climate crisis from its material basis in how the global economy functions, in how goods are produced and distributed today, and for whom. It ignores the vast differences in power between those who have to drive to work to make money to pay for their food, rent, phone bill, mortgage, insurance, health care, and children, and those who live off the rising value of their assets, returns on capital, and financial investments. In particular, such framing disregards how capitalist firms are structurally compelled by competition to maximize profit for their shareholders no matter the consequences for the planet. What drives this compulsion? It is not the desire to satisfy the needs of others, nor is it based on some moral value one upholds or social norm one feels obligated by. None of these are enough to explain the disciplining effect of the market on all actors across the spectrum of income, labor, and wealth. Despite the vast inequalities of power between those at the bottom and those at the top of the social hierarchy, none are free to act against the dictates of the price signal without being punished by the whip of poverty or bankruptcy.22 Of course, the effects are much worse for those "without reserves" than those with them. This signal is not the cause but the effect of a structure of social domination produced by those who are themselves dominated by it. For the source of the quasi-autonomous movement of commodities, money, and capital in society is nothing other than the historically specific form of value-producing labor to which human beings are subordinated by an "impersonal, nonconscious, nonvolitional, mediate form of necessity characteristic of capitalism" (Postone, 1993, p. 127). This impersonal compulsion to subject one's activity to the form of value to meet one's needs constitutes an abstract social structure with its own internal logic which renders the individual wills of human beings superfluous (see Postone, 1993; Heinrich, 2012; Bonefeld, 2014). Swallowing up and spitting out natural resources and human bodies without regard for their fate is the sine qua non of this economy, this broken metabolism of human beings with nature (Debord, 1971; Mattick, 1976). To "care" is already a sign of something gone wrong, an exogenous influence on the inner drive of capital to valorize itself. That is why institutionalizing minimal regulations against the wholesale destruction of human capacity has only been accomplished on the corpses of working-class struggles, which are always capable of being overturned; and institutionalizing minimal regulations against the brazen disruption of ecological conditions of planetary habitability has barely been achieved at all. Nothing has been able to stop the penetration of the productive apparatus deeper into the depths of human subjectivity and nonhuman nature. Every failure to ward off the subjection of some realm of existence to the imperative of value reveals the negative outlines of an alternative future, one barely keeping the flame of critical theory alive. This structure of abstract social domination—that is, "the domination of people by abstract, quasi-independent structures of social relations, mediated by commodity-determined labor" (Postone, 1993, p. 126)—is enabled by particular social property relations that separate human beings from their conditions of existence and mediate them through the forms of the commodity, money, and capital, all of which are but fetishized expressions of the alienated social power of human beings confronting them as external forces, enforced by a system logic of generalized exchange, private property, and market dependency. In other words, the relations of human beings with each other and their natural conditions of existence in capitalism is determined by the historically specific mediation of value-producing labor which constitutes a structure of social domination whose lever escapes the control of even those who benefit from it most. As private producers compete on a global market for profits, they are forced to develop new cost-cutting measures and utilize labor-saving technology, ultimately leading to general overcapacity, sales gluts, and crises, while investors are constantly seeking higher returns in financial speculation, in real estate, in asset-backed securities, in anything that can raise the value of their capital faster and higher than others. There is no stopping of this circuit except through stopping the specific form of labor which reproduces it. Whether in the home or the office, the car or the factory, the restaurant, port, library, mine, hospital, farm, field, construction site, market, university, store, call center, bank, or hotel, whether gendered or racialized in specific ways, whether formal or informal, paid or unpaid—it is the continuous subsumption of human activity into value-producing labor which both undergirds and exposes the elementary structure of capitalist social relations. The ceaseless consumption of human labor power and natural resources in the production process produces not just commodities but a specific temporal relation between past and future, one which obliterates the capacity to pause the circuit of capital, to take stock of time, as every finished cycle of production only restarts another one on an expanded scale. The hyperaccelerated timeframe of accumulation renders impossible the ability to attend to the rhythms and regenerative capacities of both the natural world and the human person. The immediate aim of any private producer is simply to outcompete other firms who themselves must outcompete other firms in a treadmill effect which itself flattens history into a unilinear directional dynamic centered around the reduction of labor costs, the development of labor-saving technology, the proliferation of new property and asset forms, the consolidation of capitals, and the cut-throat competition for market share. Since the production of needs are hostage to the vicissitudes of the business cycle, the health of the company truly is the health of society, as long as there is no other option for human beings to meet their needs outside the market. In the last two decades, a new field of scholarship has emerged bringing together such elements of critical theory and ecology. Whether discussing the "metabolic rift," the "second contradiction," "world-ecology," "ecosocialism," or "degrowth," quite an impressive debate has emerged in regards to the relation between capitalism and nature, crisis and ecology, growth and sustainability, as well as climate change and the accumulation of value. Alongside the "ecological Marxism" of Bellamy Foster (2000), Clark et al. (2010), Burkett (2014), Moore (2015), Malm (2016), and Saito (2017), I hope to contribute a "social form" analysis of climate change. Inspired by Theodor Adorno (1973), Alfred Schmidt (1971), and Moishe Postone (1993), I argue that a critical theory of climate change should move beyond the moral condemnation of "greedy" individuals and corporations for ruining the planet, and instead approach the question from the perspective of social form, that is, the specific ways in which the form-determinations of capital, value, money, and the commodity practically invert our relation to ourselves and nonhuman nature (in this regard, see O'Kane, 2018; Cassegård, 2017, 2021). Climate change, on this account, is not a separate catastrophe from others—such as the crisis of biodiversity, the sixth mass extinction, the proliferation of pandemics like Covid-19, deforestation, ocean acidification—but part of an ongoing ecological rift of the social metabolism with nature, itself determined by the specific logic of capitalist accumulation and the real subsumption of human labor under the form of value. It is this abstract, impersonal form of domination—expressed in the insuperable market imperative to produce for value and not for need—created by human beings yet set against them, which holds sway over the fate of the climate, and thus, the fate of human life. A critical theory of climate change is then a critique of the society which is compelled by its own social logic to destroy its own natural conditions of existence. The emancipatory potential of this ecological critique lies in how it focuses our attention on the social totality within which climate change unfolds, thus pointing, albeit negatively, to an alternative form of life beyond it. Climate ethics—as the specific subdiscipline of ethics which develops normative principles and policy proposals in regards to how to deal with the novel human condition of anthropogenic climate change—has been hampered by assuming that the market functions as an opportunity for voluntary agreements between free human beings for the benefit of all, instead of as an imperative one submits to for lack of an alternative (Wood, 2002, 2012; Brenner, 1986, 2007).33 While there are exceptions, it is incredibly hard to find critical perspectives in climate ethics outside the liberal mainstream focus on market-based solutions, consumer behavior, technological investment, and principles for fair emission trading. Capitalist realism is seemingly insuperable. For instance, Dale Jamieson and Stephen M. Gardiner are two climate philosophers whose own work should lead them to more radical conclusions, but they dare not make the leap. The differentia specifica of capitalist social relations is the universal market dependency of its members, that is, the fact that all members of society are forced to play by its rules at pain of hunger, homelessness, jail, or death. This is not to elide the moral and material differences between those who live off their labor and those who live off exploiting others, but rather to say that both are stuck in a game whose rules escape their individual control. To not exploit human labor and material nature, to not destroy the planet for the sake of profit is, thus, completely irrational from the perspective of all those who must conform to the a priori conditions of market experience to exist as socially validated, economically functional citizens. Granted this "opportunity," it is no wonder that society as a whole has "chosen" to follow the rule of profitability over that of sustainability. One of these rules is not like the other. To break free of the compulsion to act in the interests of capital regardless of one's beliefs requires more than having the right values and norms, the right principles and policies. Neither is it simply solved by progressive taxes or carbon credits, or even a redistribution of basic goods, since the normative problem is not simply unequal access to goods but social domination by a form of impersonal rule (Roberts, 2017). Against the background of overall market dependency, the system of universal private labor and generalized commodity exchange appears on the surface as a realm of pure liberty, in which formally free and equal owners make voluntary contracts with other owners to buy or sell commodities, such as labor power, means of production, and natural resources to produce and reproduce the world in which we live, day in and day out. One's beliefs about money and property are irrelevant since they are practically validated in these social practices (Sohn-Rethel, 1978; Heinrich, 2012). Value—or the objectification of socially necessary labor time privately produced and socially validated in exchange—marks the rule of things over humans, or the rule of things via humans. The forms of appearance of value in commodities, money, and capital are real abstractions whose effects shape social reality behind the backs of politicians, employers, consumers, shareholders, stockbrokers, urban planners, and philosophers. The universal abstract drive to produce more, to expand business, to keep working, to seek profits, to increase output or gain market share is a direct result of pressure from competition, which is itself an expression of the systematic dependency of private owners of the means of production on purchasing their inputs and selling their outputs on the market. This market dependency is systematic, impersonal, general, and cannot be solved via better ethics guidelines for businesses. What I am trying to describe here at a theoretical level is one of the defining features of capitalism as a social form, the condition that human beings are compelled to adapt their behavior and life plans according to abstract determinations of value to survive and thrive, a social logic that is only tempered by working-class struggles which allow for less market dependence for meeting one's needs. This tendency may be more pronounced in some ways now, as welfare states have been rolling back their social safety nets for decades, but it is not something new. There is, of course, immense variability in one's vulnerability to market whims depending on one's country of birth and class location, but I want to say something more than that. Rather, there is a disciplinary logic to the market that compels both the propertyless and the propertied to act according to its rules of reproduction (Clegg, 2020). To stay competitive, firms must use the most efficient technologies, the cheapest sources of energy, and the most exploitable labor—without regard for externalities or social costs like pollution, climate change, or inequality. Whether by burning coal, oil, or natural gas; by using cars, planes or ships; by transporting goods or people; or by cutting down forests or extracting fossil fuels, the deliberate choice to continue releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide every day and dangerously heat the planet is adamantly not a lifestyle choice for most of humanity. Most individuals have no control whatsoever over the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each day, no matter what any motivational speaker might say about our "power to change the world" or "reduce, reuse, recycle." Let me repeat that: the majority of human beings on the planet have absolutely no meaningful control as individuals over the amount of carbon that is emitted every single day. Rather, it is the result of institutional structures put in place to demobilize citizens from ever having a choice at all in the structure of the economy (Mair, 2013; Slobodian, 2018). Freedom of choice is the most highly cherished and protected liberal value of our time, and that freedom is sacrosanct as long as it is does not choose against the liberal economy itself (Bonefeld, 2017). To think that individual consumers are somehow to blame for the climate catastrophe for their "choices" is to already give up the possibility of collective action and accept an ideological picture which ignores the production of those choices in the first place, which, not uncoincidentally, lets governments and fossil fuel companies off the hook. At a certain stage in the historical development of capital, fossil fuels become a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus-value…they are utilized across the spectrum of commodity production as the material that sets it in motion. (p. 288) The more capital expands, the larger the volumes extracted and combusted; integral to the Stoffwechsel, fossil fuels are now subjected to productive consumption in ever-growing quantities … Since fossil energy now fuels the perpetuum mobile of capital accumulation, always igniting itself anew as a driving fire that never goes out, the cycle continues indefinitely…Fossil capital, in other words, is self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into CO2. (pp. 288–9) Ecologically destructive production is not exogenous to the production of value but intrinsic to it.44 Can the production of value be decoupled from ecological destruction? Can renewable energy technologies save capitalism from destroying its own environmental presuppositions, and even allow for a decarbonized, dematerialized, and sustainable mode of production? That is the new green snake oil being sold today, which somehow thinks that the material throughput of current levels of production can stay the same with only a few different inputs, and everything will be fine. While individual countries can reduce their carbon emissions through outsourcing their production, this is obviously not a global solution. The drivers are structural, baked in to a set of economic conditions which force producers to compete for the cheapest, most efficient, most productive labor, raw material, technology, and energy. This is not ecology but anti-ecology, a "universal appropriation of biophysical resources, insatiable in its appetite, starting and ever continuing with energy" (p. 326). The result is a death sentence for any ecology of sustainability, habitability, and human-natural flourishing. This outcome is not the result of a few bad individuals and large carbon footprints; if you change the CEO of ExxonMobil, it will not make the slightest difference. If you build more electric cars, but the demand for cars keep rising anyways, it will not make a difference. If you increase the use of solar and wind technology, but fossil fuel companies still extract, refine, and sell dangerous amounts of gas and oil from the earth, then it will not make a difference. On top of the empirical inadequacy of these measures, there are also serious ecological and human rights issues in trying to maintain current levels of production and consumption with simply swapped out renewable sources, particularly, in terms of the mining and extraction of rare earth metals (Hickel, 2019; Bernes, 2019). Moreover, just calling for "reduction" in general is also pointless, as the issue is not simply about having less stuff, but having more control over what is produced in the first place (Barry, 2020). Yet moral and political philosophers—along with journalists, politicians, activists, NGOs, oil companies, and lobbyists—continue to overemphasize the role that individual consumers play in bringing about climate change, and thus, in their ability to stop it (see Huber, 2019). by focusing on consumption and emissions, many philosophers make ordinary citizens of wealthier nations the primary antagonists of climate change – a framing that dovetails perfectly with the longstanding (and successful) efforts of liberal governments and corporations to individualise responsibility for systemic ills, even as they single-mindedly pursue growth. (p. 164) the overemphasis on footprints teaches us 'to think of consumption as determined by "lifestyle choices" rather than socially enforced logics' and teaches us 'to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of "people" and "consumption" rather than in the systemic dynamics of global capitalism'. (2020, p. 165; citing Moore & Patel, 2017, p. 204) This is a structuralist account, but not a determinist one. Structural forces exist beyond the power of individuals to change them. But they are not beyond the power of social groups to challenge them. The structures are, after all, products of ourselves, separated and opposed to us. They can always be changed, but not without changing ourselves into something else as well, a collective power. Kafka once said, there is plenty of hope, just not for us. I would amend it to say—there is a plenty of hope, just not on our own! In other words, individual choices are constrained by social structures much larger than them, and these structures need to be confronted head on to change the outcomes. For climate change, this means that not only must the demand side of the equation be transformed, but also the supply. Whereas demand-side policies focus on incentivizing consumers to change their energy use and behavior through market mechanisms, supply-side policies can focus on constricting the freedom of energy producers and other owners of productive assets in the first place (Mendelevitch, 2018). But to go after the suppliers of fossil fuels requires serious political power and transnational labor mobilization, as these are some of the biggest companies on the planet, with budgets larger than most nations. Furthermore, the suppliers of fossil fuels are not destroying the planet because they are irrational monsters, rather they are rationally searching for maximum profits and increased shareholder value like any other company which needs to grow and stay competitive to survive. Furthermore, governments which support these companies are not evil, rather they depend on the wealth and taxes of these companies for maintaining their constituencies. These companies and politicians will never vote themselves out of power—they need to be forced out. To do so requires massive interventions into the market of distribution and production—including expropriation, decommodification, socialization, regulation, capital controls, and more (Blumenfeld, forthcoming). Anything less is capitulation. The relentless mining and burning of fossil fuels is not the result of some choice by humanity as a whole, or consumers in general, or even just wealthy nations. That framing of the problem cannot distinguish between those who are actively profiting off the destruction of our planet and those who are just trying to survive in it. Global warming is rather the systemic consequence of an economic drive to produce and distribute goods as cheaply as possible for the highest returns, which practically means, burning fossil fuels whatever the cost is (Malm, 2016). These are the basic dynamics of fossil capitalism, which determines how we reproduce our lives, and cannot be simply consumed or taxed away (Brenner, 1986, 2007; Wood, 2002). Capitalism is the most dynamic economic system ever created: ruthlessly revolutionizing the means of production, destroying old industries and investing in new
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