[IMC-UK-Features] Feature proposal: relationship of climatic & economic crises

[mark]

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I'm proposing this as a feature for the UK frontpage and Leeds-Bradford,
topics climate chaos, globalisation and analysis.

I don't have a suitable picture yet, so if anyone can suggest one that
would be great.

By: We Won't Pay For Their Crisis
Homepage: http://wewontpayfortheircrisis.org.uk/
Title: What Does The Economic Crisis Mean For The Climate Change Movement?

<p>We are in the middle of two crises, the climate crisis and the economic
crisis. Although we we seem to treat them as separate, it can be
argued that they are completely entangled. Tackling one without
tackling the other is impossible and fruitless, but the connections
are complex and shifting. To intervene effectively, we need to look
carefully at how we think about time and change, and how we relate to
markets and the state. But first, let's look at how the economic
crisis arose and draw some link between this history and the
problematics of climate politics.</p>

<strong>Other aspects of economic crisis:</strong> <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/417372.html">Liverpool</a>
| <a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/421838.html">Public
services cuts</a> | <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/420514.html">Evictions</a>
| <a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/421286.html">Factory
Occupations</a>


<H3>The Last 60 Years</H3>
<P>To understand the current economic crisis (and the collapse of what we
call neo-liberalism, the most current phase of capitalism), we have
to understand how it arose. And for that we have to go right back to
the end of the Second World War. The post-war productivity boom was
based on a ‘deal’ of higher wages in return for improved
productivity – those were the days when we were told “you’ve
never had it so good”. But by late 1960s this period of growth was
being derailed by a wave of strikes and global unrest: in the
workplace there were a growing number of struggles over time &amp;
quality of life (rather than money), while there was an explosion of
anger from those excluded from this deal (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a
white, skilled, male factory worker).</P>
<P>In the face of this, the post-war settlement was killed off in the mid-
to late-1970s by a capitalist counter-attack which laid the
foundations for ‘neo-liberalism’. You can pick any number of key
moments – the coup in Chile in 1973, the defeat of the US air
traffic controllers strike in 1981, or the defeat of the miners in
1984/5 in the UK. They were all part of a much broader systematic
strategy, which played out here like this.</P>
<P>First, the old centres of workers’ militancy (mining, manufacturing) were
dismantled and outsourced to low-wage economies overseas. In the UK
in 1971 over 70% of people were employed in primary industries (like
mining) or manufacturing, today over 70% of workers are in the
service sector.</P>
<P>Second, the banking sector was massively deregulated. All sorts of
complicated ‘derivatives’ markets were created. When this started
to unravel in summer 2007, it ultimately resulted in the credit
crunch – because no-one knew what all these pieces of paper were
really worth.</P>
<P>Under neo-liberalism, wages were driven ever downward. Many of us are
have
found that every pay rise we’ve had over the last 15 years has been
below the rate of inflation. But while this boosts profits, the
problem is that it keeps consumer spending (= economic growth) down.
This problem was ‘solved’ by extending massive consumer credit,
based mostly on rising house prices. This gave us the spending power
to purchase all those lovely commodities coming out of the new
manufacturing centres in the Far East and elsewhere. Hence the
anomaly where our living standards in the UK rose at the same time as
our wages as a proportion of profits kept falling.</P>
<P>Without primary industries or manufacturing the economy came to rely
more and
more on the banking and financial sector. This sector was in turn
heavily reliant on rising house prices: complicated ‘mortgage
derivatives’ were one of the major assets held by the big banks. So
when the housing bubble burst, everything started to unravel –
banks teetered on the brink of collapse, credit dried up, and the
economy nose-dived.</P>
<P>We are in uncharted waters. Despite comparisons to 1929, this level of
collapse is unprecedented. How things pan out is of course partly
down to us. But we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the storm
that’s coming: in the UK, we’re already facing redundancies, wage
cuts, benefit cuts, wage cuts, public service cuts, repossessions &amp;
evictions. Globally, there is mass social unrest on the horizon:
workers laid off from thousands of factories in China have taken to
the streets; food riots exploded in over 30 countries across the
globe this time last year; and in the last few months we’ve seen
violent battles in Latvia, Bulgaria &amp; Iceland, not to mention
Greece, Italy and France…</P>
<H3>What Has All This Got To Do With Climate Change?</H3>
<P>In the 'liberal' media and in the thoughts of many, there’s a shift of
focus away from climate change, affecting us as
citizens/campaigners/workers/claimants but also for NGOs and local
and national government. Plus we now have to deal with the fact that
a huge slice of public funds have been diverted into propping up
financial institutions.</P>
<P>But we need to dig deeper. We talk about it as a “climate crisis” but
from the point of view of capitalism (seen as a thing, an endlessly
expanding dynamic system) it’s actually an energy crisis. And it’s
an energy crisis that capital has to tackle in order to re-launch a
new cycle of accumulation. This isn’t something new: the idea of
“limits to growth” were an endless headache for capital in the
mid-1970s before neo-liberalism took hold and unleashed new levels of
exploitation.</P>
<P>In fact energy in its widest sense has been a permanent problem for
capitalist development. Capitalism is an exploitative, ecologically
destructive system but it is also incredibly dynamic. 300 years ago,
when it faced down a similar twin crisis of a rebellious population
and ecological crisis, its salvation was coal. Unlocking these carbon
resources played a crucial role by allowing capital to substitute
machinery for our labour, at a price that could sometimes be fixed
years in advance and without risk of strikes, sabotage or go-slows.</P>
<P>It’s impossible to think about patterns of energy consumption, and
therefore about global warming, without thinking of those social
relations – capitalist social relations – that have shaped those
patterns. The collapse of neo-liberalism and the climate crisis are
intimately linked – so much so that they’re almost impossible to
separate.</P>
<P>This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for us. At the back of much of the
talk around climate change has been the idea that if we can just get
people to accept the thesis of “peak oil” or “global warming”,
then we will be able to magically pass into a different sort of
world; as if we could switch off a carbon-based economy without also
switching off the material social relations that surround it; as if
the relentless drive for economic growth is some sort of mad
aberration that we can turn off, or tone down. It’s not. There is
no accident. There are structural causes at work here: the way we
reproduce ourselves socially is bound up with the way we reproduce
ourselves economically and the way we reproduce ourselves
ecologically. But – and this is the key thing – the global
financial meltdown could lead to a recomposition of social forces
that would enable the rapid switch-over we need.</P>
<P>To get that switch-over right, here are four related areas worth
thinking about.</P>
<H4>1. How Do We Think About Time?</H4>
<P>By this we don’t simply mean the time-scales we need to think about,
although they are also important. There’s a time lag in the economic
crisis which mirrors the time lag in climate change</P>
<ul><li>the first cracks in the sub-prime sector began Aug 2007 =
implosion last
year</li>
<li>credit crisis from last summer = redundancies &amp; layoffs now</li>
<li>£500bn bank bail-out last autumn = massive public sector squeeze for the
foreseeable future</li></ul>
<P>This disconnection makes our responses very difficult – by the time we
act, it may be too late. But there’s an even more important aspect
to this time lag. Neo-liberalism has been built on a massive
expansion of debt. By mortgaging our futures (quite literally in the
case of pensions) we’ve been able to put off dealing with the fact
that a few are reaping massive profits on the back of our falling
wages. The same deferral, the same displacement of antagonism into
the future, has also been going on with climate change. However, we
know that process to be non-linear: once we reach a tipping point,
change will become irreversible, so that when the time comes to 'pay'
we'd all be screwed.</P>
<P>This leads into a deeper connection. Capitalist social relations are
based
on a particular notion of time. Capital is value in process: it has
to move to remain as capital (otherwise it’s just money in the
bank). That moving involves a calculation of investment over time –
an assessment of risk and a projection from the present into the
future. The interest rate, for example, is the most obvious
expression of this quantitative relation between the past, the
present and the future. It sets a benchmark for the rate of
exploitation, the rate at which our present doing – our living
labour – must be dominated by and subordinated to our past doing –
our dead labour.</P>
<P>It’s hard to over-state how corrosive this notion of time is. It lies at
the heart of capitalist valorisation, the immense piling-up of
things, but it also lies at the heart of the production of everyday
life. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the
future, imagine a cash till ringing up a sale, forever. This is true
at all levels, whether for capital’s planners meeting in Davos or
for us trying to make ends meet.</P>
<P>But this is the deeper meaning of the meltdown: just like global warming,
it has brought the future crashing into the present. Interest rates
are now effectively below zero. We have reached a singularity.
Capital’s temporality depends upon a positive rate of interest,
along with a positive rate of profit and a positive rate of
exploitation – all that has collapsed. And just as with climate
chaos, the debts are, quite literally, being called in.</P>
<H4>2. How Do We Think About Change?</H4>
<P>The word ‘crisis’ has its origins in a medical term meaning turning
point – the point in the course of a serious disease where a
decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. So
capitalism may be in crisis, neo-liberalism may be over, but that
doesn’t mean we’ve won. Far from it. Crisis is inherent to
capitalism. Periodic crises allow capital to displace its limits,
using them as the basis for new phases of accumulation. In that
respect, it’s true to say that capitalism works precisely by
breaking down. But that’s only true in retrospect – after the
resolution of the crisis. In fact crisis is mortally dangerous to
capital, because it means an openness to other possibilities.</P>
<P>The critical instability we’re living through offers a chance for a
phase transition, a rapid flip from one form of social organisation
to another – or to many others. From capital’s point of view,
it’s exactly this sense of openness, of possibility, that needs to
be closed down. At the three major summits this year (G20 in the UK
in April, G8 in Italy in July, and <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2009/cop15/">COP15</a> in
Denmark in December),
world leaders will be looking to contain things, to rein in our
desires, and draw a line under the events of the past few months.
“Move along now, there’s nothing to see here…” Every
‘solution’ that’s touted at these summits will also be an act
of closure, an attempt to reintroduce capitalist temporality, one
that sees the future rolling out inexorably from the present. In
other words, get back to work: normal service will be resumed as soon
as possible.</p>
<p>We have to do a fine balancing act here. On the one hand, as recession
deepens, we’ll resist any measures that restrict our immediate
freedoms. That might mean pushing for ‘solutions’ that are
slightly less damaging, and which may therefore help capitalism off
its sickbed. Individually we may accept pay cuts rather than risk
redundancies (although historically one hasn’t ruled out the
other). Similarly, the catastrophic build-up of greenhouse gases
means that we need to act quickly and decisively.</P>
<P>But on the other hand our greatest chance of something different lies in
keeping the crisis ongoing, in keeping the future <I>open</I>.
So we also have to resist the pressure from capital’s planners for
a quick fix, whether at the G20 or at Copenhagen. As soon as crises
are ‘solved’, our room for manoeuvre is diminished.</P>
<H4>3. How Do We Relate To The Market?</H4>
<P>As crises are closed down, the way the question is framed moves back on
to a safer terrain for capital. We drift back into its particular
form of temporality.</p>
<p>Climate change becomes a matter of carbon trading, or investment,
rather than
circulation of capital. It becomes a question of technical solutions
and national/international policy decisions. Funnily enough, as
climate change becomes the major topic at summits, it becomes
fundamentally depoliticised. It’s easier to debate carbon parts per
million in the atmosphere, rather than ask ourselves what sort of
worlds we want to live in.</p>
<p>It’s the same with the financial meltdown. Since last summer, it’s gone
from a “banking crisis” to a “credit crunch” to an “economic
crisis” to “negative economic growth” to “recession”. For
months the use of the word “recession” was discouraged on the
grounds that it would become self-fulfilling. But if there’s no
name to what we’re living through, it can’t be normalised. And if
it’s not normal, then we can behave exceptionally… So it’s
officially a Recession.</p>
<p>We can see this move from “crisis” to “recession” in another
way: a crisis <I>for capital</I> has become a crisis <I>for us</I>.
Costs are shifted on to us. The massive bail-out of the banking
system in the UK and the US is just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p>And it’s exactly the same with climate change. It’s obvious that
costs of climate change are met disproportionately by the poor:
globally it’s the poor who are most at risk of flooding, spread of
disease, crop failure, resource shortages etc. And without a
structural change, the costs of alleviating climate change will also
be met by the poor. Three examples: green technologies are likely to
remain expensive, so the poor will be shut out and forced to use
“dirty” energy; agrofuel schemes which are still being forcibly
rolled out across the global South (and in the US) in the face of
widespread opposition; increasing enclosure of common land in the
name of “conservation”, driving people away from resources that
they have traditionally worked in order to sustain themselves. And in
fact, as well as excluding the poor, all three have disastrous
environmental consequences…</p>
<p>If we frame the question in this way, if we support attempts to resolve
these crises through the market, and through the state, then we run
the risk of engendering a green Keynesianism. In other words, a new
regime of capitalist accumulation based on any combination of
renewable energy, nuclear power, so-called clean coal or agrofuels.
It’s easy to see how this could make sense. You start off with the
idea that in terms of life on earth “we’re all in it together”;
but we need to save the economy first to enable us to have the
resources to tackle the challenge…</p>
<p>In fact, far from being a ‘problem’ to overcome, the hope is that
climate change may actually become a primary source of revenue to
solve the massive fiscal problems faced by Europe and the US (but not
those of the global South). Renewable energy, for example, is a huge
growth sector, where demand far outstrips supply. And according to
the head of UN Climate Change Secretariat: “The credit crisis can
be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for
global green economic growth… it is an opportunity to rebuild the
financial system that would underpin sustainable growth …
Governments now have an opportunity to create and enforce policy
which stimulates private competition to fund clean industry.” Or as
the European commission President puts it when the EU signed a new
climate change deal in December “We mean business when we talk
about climate”.</p>
<p>But if the key question isn’t <I>whether</I> we shift away from fossil
fuels, but <I>how</I>, then framing the answer in terms of the market
and growth is a huge and explosive contradiction.</p>
<p>The problem of adopting the market as a frame of reference is that
capital monetizes everything, it turns everything into money. And
with financialisation, that trend has become even stronger. Under
neo-liberalism, one of the most important roles of the the state,
locally and globally, has been to impose “good governance”. In
other words, to reinforce the idea that every problem raised by
struggles can be addressed – on <I>one</I> condition: that we
address those problems through the market. There’s a solution for
everything, as long as we buy it. Or rather as long as ‘we’
(meaning the world’s poor) pay for it. If neo-liberalism had a
slogan, it would be “stop me and buy one”.</p>
<p>Ironically some of the pressure for this has come from green
campaigners who
have argued, correctly, that capitalism takes no account of
environmental costs when calculating price. But under the
dictatorship of the market, money has become the measure of all
things. The market tries to make commensurable things that are
incommensurable. But how can you ‘sell’ the right to emit carbon?
Or to poison water supplies?</p>
<p>This isn’t simply an ethical question, one of value (as imposed by
capital) against values (what we hold dear). The idea of price is
also based on linear dynamics. What price can you put on something
when you can no longer calculate the probable outcome? As sea levels
rise, it’s easy to predict coastal flooding. But then there’s the
amount and pattern of rainfall, a probable expansion of the
subtropical desert regions, Arctic shrinkage and resulting Arctic
methane release, increases in the intensity of extreme weather
events, changes in agricultural yields, modifications of trade
routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and changes in the
ranges of disease vectors… Put that in your calculator.</P>
<H4>4. How Do We Relate To The State?</H4>
<P2>With neo-liberalism in crisis, and the threat of irreversible climate
change, the state’s role is going to become increasingly crucial. A
de-carbonised global capitalism is not impossible, but it will
require even higher levels of “discipline”. Austerity will have
to be enforced on a massive scale.</p>
<p>As we said earlier, capitalism is value in process – like a shark, it
needs to keep moving or die. But this drive to self-expansion means
it needs an ever-increasing energy base. Let’s look at it from the
perspective of capitalism. The logic of capitalist growth is that it
will always seek to externalise its costs. If we imagine there’s a
three-way relation between capital, us and the environment (although
none of these three things are actually discrete), then limits
enforced in one sphere re-surface as intensified exploitation in
another. If capital can’t rob one, it will rob the other. Leaving
the coal in the hole, with no other change, means more energy sucked
from our bodies. Let’s not forget that the last capitalist era of
renewable energy (the age of sails and windmills) was also a time of
slavery, genocide and enclosures on a massive scale.</P>
<H3>Conclusion</H3>
<P>There are no easy answers here. The ground on which we’re fighting is
shifting far too fast for that. But one thing to bear in mind is that
movements rarely take straightforward forms.</p>
<p>In 1905 the Russian revolution which threw up the first Soviets began
with a small strike by typesetters at a Moscow print-works: they
wanted a shorter working day, a higher rate of pay, and the right to
be paid for apostrophes. In France the uprising of May 68 was sparked
in part by a student protest which began in Nanterre with a fight
over demand for boys to be let into girls’ dormitories…</p>
<p>Last week a wave of <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/417372.html">wildcat
strikes</a> swept through UK oil refineries. They
were hugely controversial, unpredictable, and came out of nowhere.
Who knows their long-term meaning? And is it a coincidence that they
happened in the energy sector?</p>
<p>What we're trying to say is that real powerful interventions around
climate change may well come from people and areas who don’t
explicitly identify with climate change politics. They may take the
shape instead of food riots, struggles against property developers,
fuel poverty campaigns etc.</p>
<p>There are two key points of intervention coming up. On 2 April the
G20 are
meeting in London’s Docklands. There’ll be a <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/421421.html">Climate
Camp</a> in the
Square Mile in the City of London on 1 April. Then in December
Copenhagen sees the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15).
There’s a huge mobilisation underway amid an ongoing debate about
what attitude we should adopt. Inside? Outside? One foot in? It’s
been given added significance because will be almost exactly 10 years
since the WTO shutdown in Seattle.</p>
<p>Before that, We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis are having a <a
href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/2009/02/421938.html">
meeting</a> on
Saturday 28 February. It’s called ‘We are an image from the
future’ and we will be picking up some of these themes and trying
to relate them to recent events across Europe.</P>
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