{"id":1380,"date":"2022-09-26T17:58:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T17:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2022-09-26T17:58:23","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T17:58:23","slug":"total-bp-or-shell-will-not-voluntarily-give-up-their-profits-we-have-to-become-stronger-than-them-interview-with-andreas-malm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecosocialist.scot\/?p=1380","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTotal, BP or Shell will not voluntarily give up their profits. We have to become stronger than them…\u201d Interview with Andreas Malm"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Andreas Malm is a Swedish ecosocialist activist and author of several books on fossil capital, global warming and the need to change the course of events initiated by the burning of fossil fuels over the last two centuries of capitalist development. The Jeunes Anticapitalistes (the youth branch of the Gauche Anticapitaliste<\/a>, the Belgian section of the Fourth International) met him at the 37th Revolutionary Youth Camp organized in solidarity with the Fourth International<\/a> in France this summer, where he was invited as a speaker.<\/div>\n
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As left-wing activists in the climate movement, we sometimes feel stuck by what can be seen as a lack of strategic perspectives within the movement. How can we radicalize the climate movement and why does the movement need a strategic debate in your opinion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I share the feeling, but of course it depends on the local circumstances \u2013 this Belgian \u201cCode Red\u201d action, this sort of\u00a0Ende Gel\u00e4nde<\/i>\u00a0or any similar kind of thing, sounds promising to me, but you obviously know much more about it than I do. In any case, the efforts to radicalize the climate movement and let it grow can look different in different circumstances.<\/p>\n

One way is to try to organize this kind of big mass actions of the\u00a0Ende Gel\u00e4nde<\/i>\u00a0type, and I think that\u2019s perhaps the most useful thing we can do. But of course, there are also sometimes opportunities for working within movements like Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion for that matter and try to pull them in a progressive direction as well as to make them avoid making tactical mistakes and having an apolitical discourse. In some places, I think that this strategy can be successful. Of course, one can also consider forming new more radical climate groups that might initially be pretty small, but that can be more radical in terms of tactics and analysis, and sort of pull others along, or have a \u201cradical flank\u201d effect. So, I don\u2019t have one model for how to do this \u2013 it really depends on the state of the movement in the community where you live and obviously the movement has ups and downs (it went quite a lot down recently after the outbreak of the pandemic, but hopefully we\u2019ll see it move back up).<\/p>\n

Finally, it\u2019s obviously extremely important to have our own political organizations that kind of act as vessels for continuity and for accumulating experiences, sharing them and exchanging ideas. Our own organizations can also be used as platforms for taking initiatives within movements or together with movements.<\/p>\n

For some of us, our first big climate action was during the COP 15 in 2009 in Copenhagen. Now we are in 2022 \u2013 what do you think are the lessons that the climate movement has learned since then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The COP 15 in Copenhagen was a turning point. I was very active in the run-up to COP 15 and was part of the group that organized the big demonstration there. But the sense that most of us had in the movement after COP 15 was a general sense of failure. Of course, the COP itself was a massive failure, but we also realized that the demonstrations and direct actions didn\u2019t really have an impact. The movement realized that the focus on the COP summits that we had had up until then didn\u2019t really make sense at all, and it was largely after that that you saw a decisive turn towards opposition to fossil fuel projects, blockades, climate camps and things like that.<\/p>\n

I think that this strategic turn will have to be reinforced, particularly given the fact that this year\u2019s COP will be held in Egypt and next year\u2019s COP will be held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. These two countries are both completely inhospitable to dissent \u2013 it\u2019s impossible to organize anything on the ground there and so this is different from the most recent COP happening in Glasgow. The climate movement will have to organize things in other places \u2013 we can\u2019t bring activists to Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, this resort town where the summit will happen. So, these two upcoming COPs should be occasions for the movement to pull off mass actions at various places around the world at that time, targeting fossil fuel projects.<\/p>\n

I was at the COP 26 in Glasgow last November. Again, there was a very big demonstration \u2013 something like 100,000 people, \u2013 again, there was an alternative \u201cpeople\u2019s forum\u201d, and I had a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. This is something that we\u2019ve been doing for a long time and it doesn\u2019t really get us anywhere. One very brilliant comrade in the climate movement in Portugal, Jo\u00e3o Camargo, expressed in discussions around Glasgow and in a piece he wrote that we need to decisively turn our backs on the COP process because it\u2019s so useless. As I said, the upcoming two COPs really should be just an opportunity to escalate the struggle in which we engage regardless of COPs.<\/p>\n

Carrying on with the strategic and tactical issues, in your talk the other day you mentioned the question of the role of the workers and the workers\u2019 movement as they are (and they are obviously very different in the different countries). You elaborate a lot on how to block the most destructive fossil infrastructures and companies; how do you see that in relation to the workers \u2013 not only in these sectors but more generally \u2013 and the workers\u2019 movement as you know it \u2013 be it the Swedish example or other countries?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think I phrased this a bit unfortunately the other day and I came across as too dismissive of trade unions. That wasn\u2019t really my intention. My concrete experience over the past few years in relation to trade unions has been pretty limited, but my sort of horizon is northern European and in Sweden the trade unions are completely indifferent to the climate issue probably more so than in even in Norway and Denmark. Swedish unions are totally ignorant and uninterested and also totally incapable of putting up a fight for their members interests. We have no strikes in Sweden any longer. This is probably an exception rather than the rule, but the level of class struggle in Sweden is so low that from my point of view it\u2019s extremely hard to imagine that all of a sudden organized labor in Sweden would rise to the occasion and become an important player in climate politics.<\/p>\n

In Germany, which is where I have a little bit more concrete experience of climate activism to an extent, the situation is a little bit more complicated. On the one hand, with the Fridays for Future movement in 2019, which was stronger and larger in Germany than anywhere else, you had a moment in the autumn of 2019 when you had a trade union component to these strikes and the big public sector union called on its members to join. On the other hand, you have a very negative experience from the struggle around coal in Germany \u2013 which is really a key struggle in the whole European field of climate politics \u2013 where the big trade unions have resisted calls for an immediate or even early phase-out of coal and have been very retrograde in clinging to coal.<\/p>\n

Out of this experience a position has emerged that has been articulated by my dear friend and comrade Tadzio M\u00fcller, who has been sort of a key organizer, strategist and thinker of Ende Gel\u00e4nde. He now almost says that he considers the working class in the global North to be more or less part of the enemy \u2013 he thinks that the organized working class is so invested in the existing economy that it will just defend coal and similar things like it has in general. Then there is an opposite position which is very forcefully articulated by another friend in common, Matt Huber, in his recent book Climate Change as Class War. Building Socialism on a Warming Planet: he says that the only hope for climate politics is to activate the forces of organized labor and that it\u2019s only by turning towards the working class \u2013 including by taking jobs in the industry, something like the old industrial turn that we had in the 80s \u2013 that we can make any progress on the climate front. So the organized working class is the only conceivable subject of a climate revolution. So these are like polar opposites and here I find myself advocating a kind of centrist position between these two. I cannot accept the idea that the working class is part of the enemy \u2013 not even coal workers \u2013 but on the other hand I don\u2019t really believe in the idea that organized labor will be the prime mover of the climate front. I think the prime mover of the climate struggle will be and is a climate movement that isn\u2019t defined around class. I think there are three routes for someone to be interested in the question of climate: 1) having some kind of personal experience of adverse weather which is becoming more and more common; 2) having knowledge of the severity of the crisis without having personally experienced it, which isn\u2019t very hard to get by and doesn\u2019t require a PhD or any university degree; 3) being animated by solidarity with people who suffer from climate disasters around the world. I would think that these are the three main routes into the commitment to climate struggle and none of these routes necessarily pass through the point of production. So it\u2019s potentially a funnel that draws people into the climate movement from various points along the landscape of class society.<\/p>\n

The movement that emerged in 2019 was largely defined not along the lines of class or race or gender, but rather of age. It was primarily a youth phenomenon \u2013 with Fridays for Future in particular \u2013 and there is a logic to that because the climate crisis has a very distinct temporal aspect: it\u2019s young people who will have to deal with this through the rest of their lives while old people have perhaps benefited from the fossil economy and won\u2019t see as much of the damage. I think this needs to be theorized and to an extent accepted and understood that the age component of the climate struggle will be significant in the coming mobilizations. I think that Matt Huber and others who argue along similar lines as he does are correct insofar as the climate movement needs an alliance with the working class and with segments of organized labor to amass sufficient strength to turn these things around. The climate movement has to make sure that its politics are compatible with working class interests and can converge with those interests. But that\u2019s something else than putting all eggs in the basket of an industrial turn or proletarianization of the climate movement, which I think would be a strategic dead-end. Now the promise of the Green New Deal and of all these kinds of initiatives that we\u2019ve seen in recent years \u2013 which haven\u2019t come to fruition unfortunately, but that doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re useless or doomed \u2013 that the climate transition goes hand in hand with improving the standards of living for workers and strengthening the bargaining power in the political position of the working class is something that needs to be pursued further.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the concrete tactical questions about relating to workers when you are having a blockade, again, from the German experience I think it would be a massive mistake \u2013 a workerist error if you like \u2013 to prioritize good relations with the coal workers over having an effective blockade that temporarily damages the interests of these workers because you close their mines for a few days or something like that. There have been numerous initiatives to try to establish contact and dialogue with coal workers in Germany and it\u2019s been very unsuccessful, particularly in the east where the coal workers rather tend to move towards the far right \u2013 the Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland, AfD \u2013 as a defense of their interests because the AfD wants to continue with coal forever and doesn\u2019t believe in the existence of the climate crisis. Then again, we definitely shouldn\u2019t give up on the idea that the type of transition we want to see has to ensure that workers in sectors that have to be dismantled completely get equivalent or better jobs, preferably in the places where they live so they don\u2019t have to move. This should be a key component of the transition. But eventually you can\u2019t expect workers in the fossil fuel industry itself to take the initiative for closing down that industry \u2013 it\u2019s a basic Marxist insight that their immediate day-to-day class interest is of course to keep their jobs. So the initiative to close that industry down has to come from the outside and the blockade is a manifestation of this: we\u2019re coming from the outside and we want to shut this sector down because it\u2019s necessary. But you don\u2019t want to make these workers your enemies and you don\u2019t want to consider them the enemy \u2013 you want to tell them that unfortunately they are employed in a sector that has to be shut down but that we are demanding that the transition ensures that they get equivalent or better jobs where they live.<\/p>\n

I really felt the mistake I made the other day \u2013 coming across as too dismissive of the trade unions \u2013 when I was at this workshop about eco-unionism, where I heard several cases \u2013 some of them I knew about \u2013 of workers in factories actually proposing a conversion of their production. We\u2019ve had a comrade in the Swedish section of the Fourth International (FI) who has been doing absolutely heroic work in the metal workers\u2019 union in the auto industry for decades; he has been trying to establish the idea that auto workers can save their jobs by proposing a conversion of their plants to something like electrical boxes or wind turbines or whatever it is that could be used for the for the transition. Unfortunately, he just hasn\u2019t made any progress because he\u2019s so isolated and the trade union bureaucracy has such complete control. I have sort of followed his efforts for two decades, and he\u2019s banging his head against the wall of trade union bureaucracy trying to get somewhere with this idea. I\u2019ve sort of lost faith in it because it hasn\u2019t produced any results; but in cases where it does produce results, I\u2019m obviously extremely excited and happy to be proven wrong. Nothing would make me happier than the spreading of these kinds of examples of workers in factories having ideas about the transition.<\/p>\n

A glimpse of hope from Belgium then. It\u2019s not like the trade unions are very green and climate friendly \u2013 well, they say they are but in reality they\u2019re not, as demonstrated for instance by their position in favor of the extension of the airport in Li\u00e8ge to build a hub for Alibaba\u2019s activities in Europe \u2013 but still, in the 2019 Youth for Future movement, we saw a new group called Workers for Climate that was created by grassroots and left-wing unionists. What\u2019s more, the main unions \u2013 including the bureaucracies \u2013 sent delegations to the demonstrations, and the most progressive wings of the CSC union, organizing for instance the retail workers but also the aviation branch, officially covered the workers who would strike. It\u2019s very symbolic, but still it was made public and the workers received the information that they could go on strike and be covered by the union.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a universe away from Sweden, it would never happen there \u2013 but it\u2019s great!<\/p>\n

Another thing: in the Belgian public transport sector, there is a real interest in the climate issue. This reminds of the\u00a0statement by Naomi Klein<\/a>\u00a0that railway workers on strike are actually struggling for climate. There may be some sectors of the working class and some unions in some countries that could more easily be reached regarding the climate issue.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My limited understanding of Belgium is that you still have a fairly significant industrial manufacturing sector and a working class that every now and then engages in some serious battle for its interests. So you have some class struggle happening in Belgium \u2013 we have nothing in Sweden, absolutely nothing! But where there is class struggle happening, of course the potential exists for workers themselves taking initiatives or for the climate movement drawing them in or for convergence or productive interaction, and this should be taken up. It\u2019s exclusively a question of the level of intensity of the class struggle. At the COP 26 for instance, there was this strike happening in Glasgow by garbage collectors, and Greta Thunberg approached them and expressed her support for their strike, and they joined the big march. That\u2019s just one example of how these things can play out. Sweden is perhaps an extreme case, but the problem is that generally I think that the intensity of working class struggles is very low compared to what it was in the 80s, 70s, 60s \u2013 not to mention of course the 1920s. If the climate issue had exploded in the 1950s and 60s, it could have played out completely differently. Now it has exploded in a moment of doldrums where the working class is historically quite weak.<\/p>\n

One last example of how at some point we could find another potential, in Belgium at least: during the last general strike before the pandemic, in February 2019, the airspace was shut down and there were no flights at all for 24 hours. This shows what unions are still able to do and how they could potentially change things for real. On another note: now there is a huge energy crisis which is also part of the reason why there is a very high inflation in several countries, and this is a major topic which is being discussed within the labor movement in general and which also mobilizes people to demonstrate. Could there be a point of convergence here, where we can easily highlight the need to solve the energy crisis for environmental reasons as well as for social reasons?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely. I guess that two demands should be efficient in that situation. First, roll out renewables as fast as possible, also because they\u2019re now cheaper than fossil fuels actually, so the cost of a unit of electricity is lower if it comes from wind and solar than if it comes from any fossil fuel in Europe. There should be massive public investments in order to deploy renewables as fast as possible. Secondly, in this situation of rising energy prices, it should be seen as fundamentally perverse that private oil and gas companies are swimming in these insane superprofits and you should be able to whip up some kind of public anger about these.<\/p>\n

Definitely. In France \u2013 but probably also elsewhere \u2013 there has been a proposal from the parliamentary Left to implement a special tax on these profits \u2013 and even a limited number of Macron\u2019s MPs, who usually act as loyal soldiers for his authoritarian neoliberalism, seem to be inclined to agree on this idea. Now these are immediate demands, but you also put forward transitional demands to be taken up by the climate movement, i.e. demands that enter in direct contradiction with the ongoing capital accumulation. What are some of these demands?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of them is the demand for not a single additional fossil fuel installation or infrastructure. This can apply to an airport, a highway or a gas terminal or oil pipeline among other things. Another transitional demand \u2013 and obviously none of this is my invention, it\u2019s something that is being discussed more and more \u2013 is nationalizing the private energy companies and taking over oil and gas and coal companies and forcing them to do something different, to stop their extraction of fossil fuels as fast as humanly possible and perhaps instead roll out renewable energy or even engage in carbon dioxide removal \u2013 that means taking down CO2 from the atmosphere in one way or another. But these are only two dimensions, they are not the only ones and again, it depends on where you find yourself. In some countries, the oil and gas and coal sectors are already nationalized \u2013 there, you would have to formulate this differently.<\/p>\n

You mentioned carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which is a great opportunity to discuss geoengineering. You warn a lot about solar geoengineering and Naomi Klein also does, and we can fully understand why when we see the nightmare it could be when we read or hear about that. Yet in the media in general there is not much writing about that \u2013 then again, you say you fear that it might come out all at once \u2013 and we seem to hear much more about carbon dioxide removal. Why is that? What\u2019s your take on solar geoengineering? And what\u2019s your take on carbon dioxide removal \u2013 given the state of things now, is it becoming unavoidable as a necessary yet insufficient part of the solution, to be deployed next to massive reductions of emissions?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a massive field which we can talk about for hours. I have a research project on this topic with a Belgian colleague from Lund university, who is also a friend and comrade, Wim Carton. We have a research grant and this coming autumn we will do research with a whole team of interns \u2013 made up of students from my Master\u2019s program in human ecology \u2013 on various aspects of carbon dioxide removal. We will write a book with Verso in the spring, which would be about both carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering and whose working title right now is Overshoot. Climate Politics When It\u2019s Too Late. I spent the past couple of months writing about solar geoengineering and trying to understand it. This might sound bizarre but I\u2019m trying to use psychoanalysis to understand solar geoengineering because it has the component of repressing a problem as in the Freudian model of repression, where you push something out of the conscious so that it appears not to exist, but under the surface it\u2019s bubbling and sooner or later it explodes.<\/p>\n

CDR and solar geoengineering need to be distinguished as they work in different ways. You\u2019re absolutely right that solar geoengineering isn\u2019t much talked about. Some vulgar Marxists have sort of anticipated that big fossil fuel companies would promote solar geoengineering as a way continuing with business-as-usual. That has not happened: neither ExxonMobil nor any other big fossil company say anything about solar geoengineering, nor is there any government that\u2019s advocating it and there\u2019s no far right party advocating it \u2013 although during the Trump era there was this expectation that he would soon flip over into advocating solar geoengineering, none of that has happened. On the contrary, carbon dioxide removal, which works very differently, is something that all the big oil and gas companies say that they are planning on doing as part of their net zero propaganda, and you can see far right parties \u2013 someone here on this camp mentioned Berlusconi the other day \u2013 advocating in favor of planting trees and things like that, and there are also a lot of startups and capitalist companies who see carbon dioxide removal \u2013 perhaps particularly direct air capture \u2013 as a new line of business where you can produce commodities and make profit from them. So you have this sort of the burgeoning field of business opportunities in CDR that doesn\u2019t exist in solar geoengineering because that doesn\u2019t produce any new commodities that you can sell.<\/p>\n

There are many differences between them but another one is that CDR, just as you suggested, is going to be necessary because the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high. We need to get CO2 down from the atmosphere, back under the ground, locked into subsurface storage \u2013 where it was originally before it was taken out in the form of fossil fuels and set on fire. The only way to do that on a massive scale seems to be to use some kind of advanced technology \u2013 planting trees is not going to be enough because you can\u2019t return carbon to the passive part of the carbon cycle, under the ground, just by planting trees. Planting trees affects the active carbon cycle, but to get it back sequestered under the ground, where it\u2019s locked out geologically from the active carbon cycle, you need something else. A technology like direct air capture has promise in this respect because it can actually capture CO2 and mineralize it, so you turn it into stone under the ground.<\/p>\n

There are now plants on Iceland doing that and it\u2019s essentially a proven technology, but the problem there in our analysis \u2013 Wim and I wrote an article about this in Historical Materialism \u2013 is that this technology is being captured by private interests who don\u2019t see any profits potential in taking the carbon and burying it underground, because that means that you essentially put a resource out of the business cycle. What they can do instead to make profit is to capture the CO2 and turn it into a product such as synthetic jet fuel or they can use it in fertilizers or capture CO2 and sell it as fizz to Coca-Cola \u2013 this is what Climeworks, one of the big direct air capture companies, does. When you use it as a commodity, then you can make a profit, but that\u2019s just recycling the carbon because it doesn\u2019t actually put it under the ground. So if you want to put it under the ground you need to sort of liberate this technology from the compulsion to make profit \u2013 that\u2019s our view.<\/p>\n

Solar geoengineering on the other hand is a very different story because it comes with so many dangers of messing with the climate system. The biggest risk, of course, is what is known as the termination shock: if you do solar geoengineering, you have this sunscreen but you continue to build up CO2 in the atmosphere; what happens is that all of this CO2 in the atmosphere is just waiting to exercise its radiative forcing \u2013 its impact on the climate; \u2013 so if the sunscreen is taken down for some reason, boom, all of a sudden this accumulated CO2 creates an enormous rise in temperatures. (Picture boiling water on which you put a lid and it continues to boil, it burns hotter and hotter, and then you take away the lid and the whole boiling water comes out of the pot.) That could lead to the most unimaginably disastrous spike in temperatures and there are all sorts of other dangers with geoengineering. Therefore, solar geoengineering isn\u2019t something that people on the left should advocate for, and here I part company with someone like Kim Stanley Robinson for instance. He\u2019s a novelist who wrote a great novel called The Ministry for the Future, probably the best climate fiction so far, but he advocates in favor of solar geoengineering \u2013 which forms a big part of that book \u2013 from sort of a left-wing perspective. A colleague of mine, Holly Jean Buck, does the same thing in the US: she\u2019s written about solar geoengineering, and she says that this is something that the left should look upon as a potentially useful technology.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it is useful, I don\u2019t think we should ever advocate it, but we should prepare for it because it\u2019s so likely that it will start; the likeliness does not come from any aggressive sponsorship, so far like we said it\u2019s almost never talked about, but there is a logic to it which is that there is only one known technology that has a potential to immediately reduce temperatures on earth. Carbon dioxide removal would have effect over decades, and likewise, if we were to stop emissions now you wouldn\u2019t see a drop in temperatures \u2013 you would see the temperatures rising more slowly and then perhaps flattening out. If you are in a situation where you feel we are in a total emergency and we have to do something and reduce temperatures, the only thing you can do to accomplish that is to shoot sulfate clouds into the atmosphere. It\u2019s the only known technological option for doing this. With every summer, with every new season of disasters, my feeling is OK, when will the order be given to implement geoengineering? When will things break, when will the system snap and when will there be a sudden real sense of emergency that \u2013 as in during the pandemic \u2013 we have to do something and when will there be this moment where governments start looking around: \u201cwhat can we do? The American West is on fire\u201d, or becoming a desert, or the entire Europe is burning or whatever? And then there is only one thing you can do.<\/p>\n

If we are in such a moment and the planes take off, I\u2019m not saying we should for instance shoot down those planes or sabotage them or something like that. But we should think about what a left strategy in such a moment would be because it looks increasingly likely for strictly logical structural reasons. There are more and more signs that part of the sort of bourgeois intelligentsia is moving towards this. For instance, there is a think tank called the Paris Peace Forum which aspires to be like the World Economic Forum in geopolitics \u2013 they have put together a commission on overshoot which is chaired by Pascal Lamy who was previously chairing the WTO, and he said a few months back that we need to look into geoengineering, that there is no other way\u2026 You know this guy?<\/p>\n

Yes, he is or used to be a neoliberal member of the Social-Democrats in France, he was EU commissioner for trade and then he went to the WTO\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right. Another sign is that about a year ago the US National Academy of Sciences put out a long report advocating a national research program into geoengineering, and I think that it\u2019s far more likely that Biden and the Democrats initiate moves towards this than Trump and the Republicans. So this is something to closely monitor and prepare for.<\/p>\n

This leads us to the question about the state. Many people and many leftists say that the climate and more generally the ecological disaster is a reason why we need to take up the question of the state and not only focus on something like local alternative societies, because it\u2019s so global and so bad and it will require so many investments and decisions and so on, that you need to find something as a state to act. But then of course there is the question of what kind of state we are thinking of. You talk about it a bit in in your book on the pandemic \u2013 it would be interesting to explore that question.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fundamentally, I think that the observation is correct that this crisis, however it\u2019s dealt with, is going to be dealt with by the state. Solar geoengineering would be an incredibly extreme intervention into the whole planetary system and it would be carried out by some states. Carbon dioxide removal on a large scale obviously requires massive involvement from the state. Emissions reductions also require the state because the reductions will have to be so big and quick and comprehensive that no other agent than the state can conceivably do it. Here we should point out that all scientists who advocate carbon dioxide removal and\/or solar geoengineering are perfectly clear that none of this will work without massive emissions reductions. Those who advocate solar geoengineering nowadays never say that we can do this instead of emissions reductions, they say that we have to do both at the same time; the question is \u201cis it really likely that both happen at the same time?\u201d They think so, I think that\u2019s an optimistic illusion. What I mean here is that there is no serious way out of the climate crisis without massive emissions reductions, and they have to be extraordinarily fast and deep and radical.<\/p>\n

Now in whichever path states follow, I think states will undergo changes into their character. If you have a state that is implementing solar geoengineering, that state will become extremely powerful because it will rule the climate of the planet, so you would have all sorts of dangers of authoritarianism and extremely centralized control over climatic conditions in other parts of the world. There are all sorts of scenarios: solar geoengineering might cause monsoon failure in India or some other very bad side effect somewhere in the global South. But the state that does geoengineering \u2013 it could be the US for instance \u2013 will probably continue regardless and thereby exercise incredibly centralized power over humanity.<\/p>\n

Now a state that undertakes massive emissions reductions could also change character. it might be authoritarian because it needs very forceful steering of the economy and of society if you\u2019re going to have these rapid emissions reductions. But there could also of course be a deepening of the democratic substance of that state: for instance if you nationalize private fossil fuel companies, what you do is that you essentially extend the democracy to the sphere of energy production. In other words, you put it under public control and take one sector of the economy into the hands of the democratic polity, which in a way pushes against the limits of bourgeois democracy which says that democracy is this strictly political sphere and that the economy is a sphere that runs itself and should not be intruded. If you take over the energy sector and put it inside the political sphere then you sort of extend democracy into the economy. I think that a real transition requires this kind of deepening of democracy and that it can take on potentially something like a rupture, a revolutionary change in the sense that if you are ever going to accomplish this you probably have to defeat a very important part of the class enemy because it\u2019s not like Total or BP or Shell will voluntarily give up and say \u201cOK, take our companies and we will never again have any profits and we\u2019re just going out of business and dying voluntarily\u201d. That\u2019s not how it works usually in history. So if we are going to accomplish that, we need to become stronger than them which is a very tall order because they are so much stronger than us right now. So we need to become stronger than them and if we were to defeat them, then that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean total social revolution but it\u2019s a change in property relations that could perhaps set in motion a process that goes beyond the current order of things.<\/p>\n

Apart from the question of the state and of local initiatives, there is the question of the role of the individual. There is an important, frequent narrative put forward by corporations and governments that it\u2019s essentially the responsibility of the individuals to solve the ecological disaster, but there is also sometimes pressure in the activist circles to live and act differently and maybe sometimes even to solve this question by individual or small changes on the scale of the individual or the community. What is your impression about this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a question that always pops up and that we struggle with all the time. Generally, I think it\u2019s important to point out that individual lifestyle changes will never be the solution and that what you can do as an individual has extremely limited effect. Buying into this whole narrative that I as a consumer can change things by shopping differently is to capitulate to a bourgeois narrative about society that is fundamentally false. First of all, you as a consumer can affect extremely limited change on your own. And you acting as a consumer is fundamentally unequal in the sense that it\u2019s the richest consumer that has the most influence: you don\u2019t want to base your politics on your affluence. A working-class consumer might have no capacity \u2013 or no time \u2013 to buy the more expensive, more ecologically sustainable alternative. Bill McKibben was at my university once and he was asked the question \u201cwhat\u2019s the most important thing I can do as an individual?\u201d and he said \u201cstop being an individual, join with others and do things together, that\u2019s the only way to change things\u201d, and that\u2019s correct.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the idea that what you do as an individual doesn\u2019t matter at all is the opposite mistake. This isn\u2019t about impact but it\u2019s about credibility: if we advocate ecological war communism or a total transformation of society, it would be hypocritical of me or anyone arguing along these lines to make no changes in their own lifestyles and just go on flight binges or eat endless amounts of meat for instance. Saying that it doesn\u2019t matter what I do as an individual so I can do anything but I\u2019m all for a total change of society is not a way to make yourself credible. You need to practice what you preach just at least a little bit.<\/p>\n

Now there is this saying by Adorno which you might have heard: \u201cthere is no good life in a bad one\u201d, which is sometimes translated as \u201cthere is no right life in a wrong one\u201d. To me, this means that if you\u2019re stuck inside in a system that is fundamentally rotten it\u2019s extremely difficult for you to purify or purge yourself and live in a completely sustainable fashion. That\u2019s virtually impossible, unless you go out and live on your own as a hunter-gatherer in the forest to escape from the dirt of capitalist industrial civilization. We cannot strive for complete purity, it\u2019s impossible because you want to be part of society and you want to affect change in that society \u2013 you don\u2019t want to stand isolated outside of it. And as long as you\u2019re inside of it, which again is a prerequisite for changing it, then you have to make concessions to the society in which you live. This has always been the situation with our struggles: the workers have a relation of dependence to their employers and receive wages from their employers; they fight against their employers but they\u2019re still in a relation of dependence and can\u2019t just escape that dependence. In the same way, we are locked into a system that makes us consumers of fossil fuels and we can\u2019t just parachute out of it completely.<\/p>\n

This means for each and one of us that we need to negotiate this in our own lives and make decisions balancing what\u2019s the right thing to do. And here the thing that most often comes up is flying because that\u2019s the worst thing you can do as a private consumer in terms of emissions, and it\u2019s also an act that is hard to resist sometimes because for instance if you want to go to North America for some reason \u2013 there might be a political reason for you to go there \u2013 then there is no other option than flying. Last December I needed to go to Egypt because that\u2019s a country I have connections to. And for the first time in human history you can\u2019t get on a boat on the northern Mediterranean and cross to the southern Mediterranean \u2013 there are no boats to Egypt! That\u2019s bizarre because that\u2019s how people have traveled for millennia for instance between Egypt and Italy \u2013 but it\u2019s not there any longer because an entire capitalist society has enforced aviation is the only mode of transportation that is available. What do I do then? Do I sit home and say I can\u2019t go to Egypt because there are only flights? No, that\u2019s not what I did, I took a flight to go there. On the contrary, when I discussed about how I were to come here to this camp [in central France], I was first told that speakers are asked to take the cheapest transportation to the camp, which in my case would have meant flying here but that wouldn\u2019t have felt right \u2013 I try to avoid flying within Europe. And then I was alerted to the bus of the Danish delegation leaving from Copenhagen, so of course I took the Danish bus because that\u2019s a much better thing to do. But I think that there is no general rule for how to deal with these things in individual lives other than try to avoid excessive emissions and try to avoid emissions-intensive choices when possible. Of course you have to weigh this against other factors \u2013 the political projects you\u2019re involved in or family affiliations and so on. In any case, we need to abandon first the idea that my individual actions are what\u2019s going to change society and secondly the idea that you can become pure and free of sin and guilt in this society.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0your interview<\/a>\u00a0with Stathis Kouv\u00e9lakis for Hors-S\u00e9rie, you added another argument about how consumers don\u2019t have control about how things are produced, about the global chains of production and so on, and that\u2019s another important issue for us as Marxists.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, for instance the steel sector which is crucial when it comes to emissions \u2013 there is no way that a consumer of final products really can make an impact on choices in the steel sector because steel is an input into other commodities, and as a consumer when you buy a car or whatever it is you don\u2019t get into contact with the steel industry directly, you cannot boycott it.<\/p>\n

One word on Sweden where you come from. What\u2019s the state of the climate or ecological movement besides Greta Thunberg and what are the challenges for the Left in the country?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, Greta is an anomaly because the climate movement in Sweden is extremely weak. Sweden is generally a graveyard for social movements and Greta became famous in Sweden because she first became famous in Europe. She was kind of discovered by the Swedish media all of a sudden \u2013 \u201cso there\u2019s this Swedish girl who\u2019s becoming very famous in Europe so we need to cover her here as well\u201d. But Fridays for Future as a movement was always weaker in Sweden than in Denmark, not to mention Germany or even Belgium. We never reached the stage where you were \u2013 at some point in late 2019 there were a couple of fairly big demonstrations in Stockholm but still far from the influence and the magnitude seen in other countries. There are initiatives here and there. At the time this interview is published there will have been a small scale Ende Gel\u00e4nde type of thing in late August against a cement company on Gotland, an island to the east of Sweden. There was a massive flop in early June: an attempt by activists in Stockholm \u2013 I was part of it in the beginning \u2013 to establish a campaign called \u201cPull the Plug\u201d during a summit which took place in early June and didn\u2019t receive any media attention. The summit was called \u201cStockholm+50\u201d because in 1972 there was an important UNEP summit there that was sort of a milestone in the development of international environmental politics \u2013 so the idea was that 50 years later, the Swedish government and UN would have a 50 year anniversary summit. We wanted to make actions at the same time, but the only thing that eventually happened was a march between various apartments where CEOs of oil and gas companies and banks in Sweden were living. We were going their outside of their apartments, burning some Bengal fires, chanting and so on \u2013 a great idea, but there were only 100 people. 100 people after half a year of attempts at mobilizing: a complete failure. Embarrassing even.<\/p>\n

And then there is the question of the Left. There is the Left Party, which is the former Communist Party, and our FI section dissolved itself as a party \u2013 we used to be the Socialist Party and now we are called Socialist Politics \u2013 largely to be able to work inside the Left Party. Now the Left Party has a new chairwoman since a couple of years, Mehrnoosh Dadgostar, who goes by the name Nooshi. She has abandoned the climate politics of her predecessor Jonas Sj\u00f6stedt. He was an auto worker who used to work at the Volvo plant in Ume\u00e5 in northern Sweden and was very close to some of our FI comrades because the largest metal workers union in northern Sweden is led by members of the Swedish section. He sort of started the process of inviting us into the Left Party in the years when Podemos and Syriza were interesting left-wing forces. He wanted to open up the Left Party and make it more that kind of party and suggested that we work together. He had a personal commitment to climate politics and he made it a profile issue of the Left Party. But Nooshi\u2019s strategic project is to win over working class voters from the Sweden Democrats \u2013 the far right \u2013 back to the Left Party. Now I\u2019m simplifying a bit but she kind of has the idea that the working class is essentially the white working class in old industrial or postindustrial towns in rural areas, and that in order to win back these voters from the Sweden Democrats we have to tone down our climate politics and our anti-racism. Our current \u2013 Socialist Politics \u2013 and quite a few others within the Left Party are of course dissatisfied with this turn \u2013 this is a controversial line that she has taken. She\u2019s styling herself as an old-fashioned Social Democrat, very pro-industry \u2013 she likes to go to construction sites and put a helmet on and take photographs of herself posing as a worker, this kind of workerist attitude\u2026<\/p>\n

This sounds similar to the short-lived experience of Sahra Wagenknecht\u2019s Aufstehen in Germany.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, it is that sort of thing. You have this tension all the time: should we be against \u201cidentity politics\u201d and just go for hardcore class issues or should we have a broader understanding of class and the revolutionary subject. And unfortunately she has a very clear tendency towards the former position in this debate.<\/p>\n

One last word about Code Rouge, the action we\u2019ve already mentioned at the beginning of the interview. As Gauche Anticapitaliste, we are members of a quite large coalition \u2013 with organizations such as Greenpeace for instance \u2013 which is planning an important action of civil disobedience in the beginning of October. The goal is to block a big infrastructure from Total\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, wonderful!<\/p>\n

We agree with you! (Total bought the main Belgian oil company Petrofina 20 years ago by the way.) We aim at mobilizing more than 1,000 activists for this action. It\u2019s really ambitious \u2013 we would like to accomplish something like Ende Gel\u00e4nde, which is very inspiring. We are working hard to make it a success\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you have dates for this action already? Where will it be? Is there a website?<\/p>\n

Yes, it will take place during the weekend of 8-9 October. There is a website which is\u00a0https:\/\/code-rouge.be\/<\/a>\u00a0(in French and Dutch). The place has not been disclosed yet \u2013 we\u2019ll disclose it at the last moment to have more chances of success in this confrontational action.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, it makes sense. Perfect! Unfortunately I can\u2019t make it on these dates, but if I could I would definitely join!<\/p>\n

July 2022<\/i><\/p>\n

Originally published on International Viewpoint, 12 September 2022 https:\/\/internationalviewpoint.org\/spip.php?article7810<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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