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by David Camfield
originally published in rs21 The recent series of articles on the rs21 website about settler colonialism (see note at end) raises important questions for socialists, especially for those of us in countries such as the US, the Canadian state, Australia, and New Zealand. My aim in this contribution is to pose these questions as clearly as possible and briefly suggest how supporters of socialism from below should approach them. The first question is this: Is a distinctive form of oppression created when a colonizing society establishes settlers on a permanent basis in a colonized territory, dispossessing the Indigenous inhabitants? I think there is overwhelming historical evidence that this has happened in many parts of the world, with the establishment of Israel and Chinese rule over the Uyghurs in Xinjiang being some of the most recent cases. This is settler colonialism, distinct from the franchise colonialism of, for example, British rule in India. As Sai Englert puts it, in such situations: Settlers settle. They (aim to) make colonised lands their permanent home and in the process enter into continuous and sustained conflict with the Indigenous populations, whom they (attempt to) dispossess, exploit and/or eliminate.[1] What does settler colonialism mean today? The second question is more controversial among socialists: Does settler colonialism still exist in capitalist societies that have changed enormously since settler colonialism was established? Many socialists agree that Israel today is settler colonial, but what about the US, the Canadian state, Australia, and New Zealand? Steve Leigh argues that these …are capitalist societies with capital accumulation based on the exploitation of the multi-racial/multi-ethnic/multi-gendered working class. Capital accumulation now comes from extracting surplus value from the working class, not primarily from continued land theft from the Indigenous. This description is accurate but it does not change the fact that capitalism in these societies is still mediated by settler colonialism, as well as by racial, gender, and other forms of oppression. The conditions in which capital accumulation and the rest of social life happens still include the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. In spite of talk about reconciliation and despite limited legal reforms, the state continues to deprive Indigenous nations of almost all the lands in which they lived before the arrival of European colonisers. It also still denies them the authority to govern themselves. The way settler colonialism is organised has changed, in large part due to the struggles of Indigenous peoples themselves. The composition of the non-Indigenous populations has changed enormously due to immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But none of this has made settler colonialism evaporate. For example, in the Canadian state, where I live, governments and many corporations and other institutions apologise for past wrongs, talk about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and acknowledge them culturally. But the most the state is willing to concede is ‘limited recognition of Indigenous rights and Indigenous participation in decision-making.’ This falls far short of creating an equal relationship between Indigenous nations and the nation that dominates within the state, as well as the Quebec nation (which oppresses Indigenous peoples but is subordinate to the dominant nation). Creating truly equal relationships would require unmaking Indigenous dispossession, on which this society was founded. Political implications The third question is where I think most of the fuel for the debate comes from: What are the political implications of the continued existence of settler colonialism? Socialists who deny that certain societies are settler colonial today worry, as Jordan Humphreys puts it, about ‘writing off the revolutionary potential of the non-Indigenous working class’ in them. I don’t think settler colonialism negates that potential, and it’s a mistake to deny that settler colonialism still exists out of fear of what the political implications might be. One implication we need to grapple with is that in some societies today settler colonialism confers advantages (privilege) on workers who are both accepted as members of the dominant nation(s) and at the same time exploited and oppressed by capitalism and various other forms of oppression interwoven with it. Although the specifics are different, this resembles the way members of the working class who belong to other dominant groups (such as white people, cis men, and to a lesser degree cis women) are given certain advantages. From the perspective of socialism from below, settler colonial privilege is contradictory for the working class (as are all advantages conferred on layers of the working class that belong to dominant groups). It gives members of the dominant nation material and psychological advantages relative to Indigenous people. However, it encourages them to support an abominable social order that harms them. It’s also corrosive for working-class power. This makes it poison bait for the working class. The scale of the advantages – what those people who receive them would have to give up if settler colonialism were to be uprooted — isn’t the same in each case. It varies, and it changes over time. That’s why it needs be analysed concretely. The advantages conferred by settler colonialism on Jewish Israeli workers in Israel today are much greater than those given to non-Indigenous workers in the Canadian state.[2] But these do exist. To give one example, new immigrants in the city I live in sometimes feel encouraged to punch down at First Nations people because doing that makes some citizens more likely to treat them as ‘real Canadians’, which can help in the competition for jobs and housing. Settler colonial privilege is a reality that has the effect of encouraging workers of the dominant nation to endorse and defend settler colonialism. It’s one reason that we can expect Indigenous people will lead struggles against settler colonialism, just as we expect trans people to lead struggles against their oppression, people who experience racism to lead the fight against racial oppression, and so on. This doesn’t mean that non-Indigenous workers can’t be won to the struggle against settler colonialism. Doing that tends to be easier when the self-organised movements and struggles of Indigenous people are stronger, and also when there are more united efforts by non-Indigenous and Indigenous people around wages, working conditions, or other issues. But such united fights that don’t target settler colonial social arrangements are different from united struggles against colonialism.[3] Fortunately, Indigenous opposition to settler colonialism is having a radicalising effect on some non-Indigenous people in the four societies on which I’m focussing here. All socialists should celebrate, support, and learn from it. Non-Indigenous socialists should build political relationships with Indigenous anti-colonial fighters. Over time, this could make non-Indigenous socialists better opponents of settler colonialism and persuade more Indigenous radicals to take socialism seriously. How it ends This brings us to the question of what would it take to end settler colonialism? The answer to this is not the same in every settler colonial society. In my view, the situation in historic Palestine today is quite different from the US, the Canadian state, Australia, and New Zealand, with very important consequences for socialist strategy.[4] In those four countries it is very unlikely that settler colonialism could be uprooted except as part of a transition towards socialism launched by the working class, non-Indigenous and Indigenous together, in which an autonomous Indigenous movement plays a very active role. In these societies capitalism and settler colonialism are deeply interwoven. Indigenous people are numerically small minorities of the population and therefore have limited social power. An Indigenous movement would be essential to ensure that the process of moving towards socialism was liberatory for Indigenous people. Although the size and social power of the Indigenous (Black) working class made it possible to dismantle settler colonialism in South Africa without breaking with capitalism, this is highly unlikely in these societies, although reforms that weaken colonial oppression can be won within capitalism. Finally, Marxists shouldn’t write in blanket terms about ‘settler colonial theory’. There are many problems with non-Marxist theories of settler colonialism.[5] But Marxists should integrate the insights found in them into a better historical materialist understanding of settler colonialism that can inform struggles for liberation. There is some similarity here with how Marxists should relate to feminism. Anti-feminist Marxism has done a lot of damage, acting as a set of blinkers that keep socialists from learning from feminism in order to develop better feminist Marxist theory and practice. An ‘anti-settler colonial theory’ Marxism is a barrier to learning from radical Indigenous thinkers and some other thinkers who oppose settler colonialism as such. Denying that settler colonialism exists today outside Palestine is a mistake with bad consequences for socialist politics. Such a Marxism will repel anti-colonial radicals with whom socialists should be in dialogue.[6] David Canfield runs the website Prairie Red and the podcast Victor’s Children, and is a member of the editorial board of Midnight Sun and a member of Tempest. ---- This debate began with a two-part interview with Sai Englert, which can be found here and here . Australian socialist Jordan Humphreys then wrote a reply, which Sai Englert responded to here. American socialist Steve Leigh then continued the debate with a further review of Sai Englert’s book. [1] Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2022), pp. 5-6 [2] I touch on these in my ‘Colonialism and the Working Class in Canada’: https://www.prairiered.ca/archive/colonialism-and-the-working-class-in-canada [3] A point made clearly by Sai Englert’s reply to Humphreys: ‘Debate – A Response on Settler Colonialism’: https://www.rs21.org.uk/2024/05/12/debate-a-response-on-settler-colonialism/ [4] Settler colonialism also exists in many Latin American societies, where Indigenous peoples often make up much larger proportions of countries’ populations than they do in the states I am focussing on here. Charlie Post and I have addressed the case of Israel in ‘What Would It Take to Win in Palestine?’: https://tempestmag.org/2024/01/what-would-it-take-to-win-in-palestine/ [5] Many of these are identified in Jack Davies, ‘The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy’: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-world-turned-outside-in/ [6] I encourage readers to listen to episode 42 of the podcast Victor’s Children: ‘Settler Colonialism, Capitalism, and Indigenous Liberation: An Indigenous Marxist View’: https://soundcloud.com/user-737267994/episode-42-settler-colonialism-capitalism-and-indigenous-liberation-an-indigenous-marxist-view Originally published in Tempest.
One way we can think about tradition is who inspires us. Traditions of struggle against exploitation and oppression go back thousands of years. Think of peasant revolts around the world; the resistance of Indigenous people on Turtle Island (a term for North America mainly used by some Indigenous nations) that’s been going on since Europeans arrived; the resistance of enslaved Africans and their descendants; anti-slavery fighters like John Brown; the Industrial Workers of the World early in the twentieth century (a high point in the history of the working-class movement in the U.S.); and so many more down to the present. Which of these inspires us most or resonates most strongly with us depends on our experiences, our ideas about who we are, and our politics. When, in I Hope We Choose Love, Kai Cheng Thom urges people on the Left to take the idea of honour seriously, she writes “Honour means acting in a way that your ancestors would be proud of, even if it requires personal sacrifices to do so.” Who we consider to be our ancestors can include people from these various traditions. Another way of thinking about tradition is more specific: Where do we get our politics from? Where do we get our ideas about our goals, our strategy, and our tactics? That’s what this article is about. However, before tackling that question I want to make two initial points. First, for revolutionary victory, socialists need a developed and coherent strategy for how this can be achieved: in other words, a program. Second, it’s impossible for socialists to develop a genuine program unless we can synthesize the experiences of many socialist workplace and community organizers from across the range of sectors of the working class and oppressed people in our society and fuse them with the lessons of history distilled as theory. No socialist organization on Turtle Island is large and rooted enough to be able to make such a synthesis. For that reason, none of the organizations as they exist today can develop anything worth calling a program. Tempest doesn’t have a program; all we have is some ideas about goals, strategy, and tactics. This is true of all far-left groups in this part of the world, no matter what some of them claim. We need ideas about goals, strategy, and tactics to help us answer the political questions we face. Our answers are provisional because they can change as the world changes and as we learn—they’re not set in stone. We should have an attitude of revolutionary humility about our ideas. There are some things we can and should be certain about, since the lessons of some past victories, defeats, and other experiences are so clear. One of these is that to start a transition to a classless and stateless society of freedom, what’s needed are social revolutions made by the working class that establish its democratic rule. But the history of the socialist left tells us that we’re no doubt wrong about some things about which we feel certain today. Today, our outlook about what to do next in our society is limited by how we’re mainly drawing on the experiences of a very small number of people in a time when social struggle is for the most part at a low level. (There are important exceptions, above all at present the Palestine solidarity movement.) What questions do we face? Let’s start with three big ones. First, what kind of society are we ultimately aiming for? In other words, what’s our political horizon? Second, what would it take to break with capitalism and start a transition to that kind of society? And third, what kind of broad organizations of workers and oppressed people and what kind of socialist political organizations would be needed to make that happen? Aren’t those questions about far-off, long-term matters? Yes, but they’re still important. Our answers serve as a compass that points toward where we want the working class to ultimately arrive, though we certainly don’t claim to have a path mapped out. Our ideas about what it would take to break with capitalism and start a transition based on democratic planning towards socialism/communism have direct implications for the here and now (Marx used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably, and never thought of socialism as a stage before communism. That idea comes mainly from Stalinism. On this, see Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism.) That’s because our ideas about these long-term issues should inform how we answer more immediate questions. For example, is it important to build democratic member-run membership organizations of the Palestine solidarity movement? (Yes!) To change unions, should socialists prioritize getting elected into executive positions and hired into staff jobs? (No!) Is there a wing of the capitalist class we should seek to include in alliances against the far right? (No!) So where should we go for our political ideas? In the twentieth century, three major political traditions that considered themselves anti-capitalist dominated the Left. They all still have influence today, though less than they used to. One is parliamentary socialism. This is the dominant politics of the Democratic Socialists of America. The second is Marxism-Leninism. This is the state ideology that took shape in the USSR in the 1920s and was spread globally through the Communist movement and by the rulers of China and other states modelled on the USSR. The last tradition is Third World nationalist socialism, of which the United Socialist Party of Venezuela founded under the leadership of Hugo Chavez is one example. All three of these traditions treat state ownership of the economy as the basis of socialism. All three act as if socialism could be achieved by a minority (a party or armed forces) acting on behalf of the masses, as a substitute for them (substitutionism), either with or without some kind of revolution. (To be clear, mass socialist political organizations are necessary for revolution, as are new institutions of radically democratic popular power in workplaces and communities. The role of socialist political organizations is to provide direction in the struggle for the working class as a whole to take control of society through such new institutions.) These are three versions of socialism from above. Fortunately, there are other traditions. The one we should start from—which doesn’t mean it’s got all the answers to today’s political questions—is a kind of revolutionary socialism with several core ideas that distinguish it. First, our goal is a classless and stateless society of freedom in which people democratically plan production to meet their needs and repair humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Second, to start a transition towards that kind of society would take a revolutionary rupture that breaks the existing state and establishes working-class rule in the form of new radically democratic institutions of popular power. Third, such a transition would have to be a liberatory process carried out by ordinary people themselves. In other words, social revolution and the transition to socialism would involve the self-emancipation of the working class. No party or other minority acting on behalf of the class can substitute for the rule of the working class itself. One label for this kind of politics is socialism from below, but what matters is the political content, not the term. It’s because of these core ideas that we can say, "Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others — even by those allegedly acting on their behalf." 1 In the most generous interpretation, these were the politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and, to name some important figures and forces from over a century ago, Rosa Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks, and others on the left wing of the socialist movement before the Russian Revolution, like Eugene Debs in the U.S. After the Russian Revolution, most supporters of these politics united in the Communist International. Those who remained committed to these politics sooner or later came to recognize that, under Joseph Stalin and his successors, the USSR and other so-called “socialist” societies weren’t “building socialism” and their rulers needed to be overthrown. These included Leon Trotsky and socialists for whom his ideas were important. Some of them then tried to go beyond some of the ideas of Trotsky and Trotskyism, like the idea that small socialist groups should try to organize themselves by applying a model developed for sizeable revolutionary parties—the “micro-party” approach that Tempest rightly rejects. There were also other anti-Stalinist Marxists, including a group in Russia called the Democratic Centralists and, in Spain, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish initials: POUM). A minority of anarchists are part of this tradition too. Some of the people and groups mentioned were more consistent than others in applying a politics of working-class self-emancipation and rejecting substitutionism. And some strands of the tradition have been more insightful than others. Supporters of these politics were nearly wiped out by fascism, Stalinism, and Cold War anti-communism between the 1930s and 1950s. The survivors were marginalized, which damaged their ability to act and think politically. In the 1960s and 1970s new forces took up these politics or were influenced by them--Walter Rodney, for instance. Unfortunately, in the decades that followed, these forces were then set back—as was the entire radical Left—by major defeats that capitalists and their states inflicted on unions, social movements, and the exploited and oppressed around the world. We should think about this tradition as a trove of political resources, not an identity. (Capitalism today pushes us to obsess about identity in narrow and static ways.) It’s an essential starting point. But its existing resources are far from perfect, and they aren’t sufficient for the politics we need today. We also shouldn’t be uncritical of this tradition: Its supporters’ answers to political questions have sometimes been wrong. Sometimes its supporters’ political practice left a lot to be desired—sectarianism has long been a problem for many political traditions. And sometimes they’ve been wrong about significant issues of analysis even when their politics were generally solid. A good example of this is Lenin’s mistaken idea that reformism—politics that seek only reforms within the existing social order2—is influential above all because of a “labor aristocracy,” a minority of workers supposedly bribed by imperialist super-profits. What’s more, the best answers of the past don’t necessarily answer the questions that face us today. For example, the theory of permanent (uninterrupted) revolution developed by Trotsky in the early 20th century was an important guide to socialist revolution in countries where capitalism wasn’t yet dominant. But today every society in the world is capitalist, and the theory has been superseded. What’s still important is rejecting the idea of dividing the struggle for socialism into separate stages: first, a national liberation (or “democratic”) stage where capitalism isn’t to be challenged, followed, at some far-off day, a socialist stage. This idea has done enormous damage to the Left globally. It leads to socialists supporting governments that, regardless of what they say they’re doing, are administering capitalism through capitalist states. Examples include the African National Congress government in South Africa (which includes members of the South African Communist Party) and the Movement Towards Socialism government in Bolivia. There are no useful answers to be found in this tradition to some questions that face us today, after the passing of the classical workers’ movement. Above all, we won’t find answers about how to contribute to building unity, solidarity, democratic self-organization, and support for radical politics in a deeply divided and atomized working class in conditions shaped by contemporary capitalism, including the social industry and the deepening ecological crisis. But there are ideas that can help us as we work on this in cooperation with people who are influenced by various political traditions. One of these is the strategic concept of the united front. This theory was developed as a guide to action for revolutionary socialist parties that needed to relate to workers who supported larger and more influential reformist parties, and to the leaders of those parties. It can’t simply be applied by much smaller socialist groups in very different circumstances. Still, it’s valuable. There are also valuable ideas from other traditions that supporters of this kind of socialism should draw on to help us develop our politics. For example, to take into account how racism confers advantages on white workers, we should build on the insights of W.E.B. DuBois and those socialists who most seriously grappled with those insights in the 1960s and 1970s, like the Sojourner Truth Organization. And there are valuable ideas to learn from today’s abolitionist, anti-racist feminism, and trans liberation politics. Finally, we should aspire to develop this kind of revolutionary socialism in ways that confront the challenges of our times. Our task isn’t to guard a faith, a static tradition. We need to think for ourselves, collectively, using anti-racist, queer, feminist, and Marxist analyses of the society we’re trying to change. Yet, let’s remember that real advances for socialist ideas about strategy and tactics can only come from participating in and learning from upsurges of mass struggle. It’s those struggles that make real advances in political ideas possible. ---- 1. This quotation doesn’t mean I entirely agree with the politics of the group whose statement I’m quoting. by David Camfield
Originally published in Spectre Review The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary REPEATER BOOKS 2024 It is now a cliché in some circles to say that all politics is climate politics. Yet it is also common to not take this seriously. The ways in which climate change is affecting society are not always easy to recognize, and left politics often fails to seriously integrate the climate dimension. Moreover, Marxist attempts to directly address climate change and other aspects of the ecological crisis are often insular. As Ajay Singh Chaudhary observes in The Exhausted of the Earth, “Marxological debates – incredibly prolific in eco-Marxist literature – aren’t particularly germane to climate politics.”1 Chaudhary’s book, intended as a corrective to those trends, offers much that is helpful for thinking about the politics of climate change. The Exhausted of the Earth situates its arguments against the threat of right-wing climate realism—understood as “a political-ecological scenario of the concentration, preservation, and enhancement of political and economic power.”2 Such a scenario, Chaudhary argues, “is not only plausible and possible, but probable.”3 Today, right-wing responses to climate change often don’t involve outright denial; they simply aim for “maximal extraction for maximal maintenance or cash out that much better.”4 A world shaped by right-wing climate realism therefore wouldn’t require “some cataclysmic break”; we are already accustomed to euphemisms like “net zero” (which is “often not zero; it is continued emissions and ‘magic’”) and to “realistic” policies like the Paris Agreement, which are “predicated on fitting genuinely admirable and aggressive goals in tune with broad climate scientific understanding into a framework that assumes only modest – at best – deviations from ‘dominant’ socioeconomic conditions.”5 Right-wing climate realism would simply entail “another intensification of the existing world,” with vast inequalities, controls on migration, repression, and social murder becoming qualitatively worse.6 Because of the structures of capitalist class power, including imperialism, “the world we actually know and the one we can observe through the historical record makes the ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’ far from a bad gamble for those whose stake promises a payout.”7 However, Chaudhary also suggests that most people will not be allowed on that lifeboat and that it would be a hellish vessel for its proletarian crew. He clearly demonstrates that capitalism today is increasingly destructive for people and the rest of nature: “Even with anemic growth rates, every little bit of real capital accumulation requires yet more inputs, more extreme extraction, increased dispossession, and new ‘sacrifice zones’ – completely given over to exhaustion and debilitation,” and with “a necessarily ever-increasing speed-up.”8 Capital is neither evolving towards a non-ecocidal relationship with nature nor lightening the burdens it places on most people; on the contrary, we are burning up and burning out. Rightly noting “how income and wealth at US median levels does not translate into standard-of-living or quality-of-life conditions,” Chaudhary argues that “for the first time in modern history, there are majorities” in both imperialist and imperialized countries “whose most mundane, material interests align.”9 Accordingly, Chaudhary argues for “left-wing climate realism,” “the politics of a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion.”10 By realism he means a politics that takes seriously “how ends and means relate in the world as it stands, how existing power works, and how these might change.”11 This emphasis is important, because the false hope that the Bidens and Trudeaus of the world can be persuaded or nudged into something other than right-wing climate realism still persists. Crucially, Chaudhary also refuses the “conviction that it is simply ‘more’ or ‘less’ of this life – of wealthy capitalist modernity – that defines the boundaries of the politically possible,” an assumption accepted by most of the reformist left and far too many on the revolutionary left and in between.12 From this position, he conducts a welcome polemic against “Climate Lysenkoism”: “a broad range of self-ascribed ‘left’ and ‘Marxist’ perspectives that subordinate both natural scientific and historical realities to a quasi-mystical technophilia and an ahistorical romance of the mid-twentieth-century Northern nationalist welfare state.”13 He focuses on two left ecomodernist writers with significant profiles on the Anglosphere left (not least through their writing in Jacobin), Leigh Phillips and Matthew Huber. Chaudhary hits the nail on the head in criticizing their calls for “more ‘stuff,’ more ‘growth,’ more ‘progress’—each term accepted in its capitalist meaning, simply redecorated as ‘socialism.’”14 Left ecomodernism offers its own versions of distracting mirages first put forward by or on behalf of some sectors of capital, such as counting on the large-scale use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and greatly increasing the use of nuclear power. These politics easily lead its supporters to tail those officials of energy workers’ unions who, sadly, are in blinkered collaboration with their employers. Yet an alternative course for labour is possible: Chaudhary points to unions that have “fought tooth and nail in concert with environmental social movements” for inspiration.15 Instead of capitulating to short-sighted conservatism among workers, Chaudary affirms C.L.R. James’s argument—originally made with respect to Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian Revolution—that it is dangerous to explain to the masses the true difficulty of their situation, “but even more dangerous not to explain.”16 Chaudhary also argues for the left to take seriously the “affects, feelings, passions, and emotions all vital to political possibility” and “the ‘social desire’ for the world to be otherwise” felt by exhausted people.17 Instead of fantasies about nuclear-powered green growth, he proposes an orientation toward the “minor paradise” of a “sustainable global human ecological niche” based on a rapid planned just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, decommodified access to necessities, agroecological food systems, and a shift of power and resources to the Global South and to the workers of the world.18 In such a world, most people could live better, slower, freer lives than they do now, without blasting across all the planetary boundaries that many ecologists urge humanity to respect. In advancing left-wing climate realism, Chaudhary also offers a scathing critique of the ideology of resilience, “a management strategy and apology for the status quo.”19 Instead of resilience, he argues for the politicization of exhaustion. All over the world, we find exploited people who, in various ways, agree with US Civil Rights movement leader Fannie Lou Hamer: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”20 They are “the historical bloc, the mass political subject” that can be brought together across differences to fight for what needs to be won.21 The goal of left climate realism can be thought of as in some ways like the abolition of slavery in the US, given how much wealth would have to be destroyed and redistributed and how it would take something like civil war to attain. In thinking about the changes needed, Chaudhary emphasizes that we’re not starting from scratch and don’t need high-tech fantasies; there are many examples in the world today that could be expanded. These include promising forms of agriculture, ways of organizing urban life, and building techniques like those that help structures stay cool without power-gobbling air conditioning. The key point is that “the material potential for human flourishing ha[s] long since been achieved within global capitalist development.”22 I have emphasized what is of real value in The Exhausted of the Earth. However, in addition to a few questionable ideas about historical matters, such as scorning the claim that China under Mao was qualitatively similar to the USSR, the book has some significant weaknesses that are directly relevant to “politics in a burning world.”23 Chaudhary characterizes capitalism as forever stuck in low GDP growth, but this assumption (which shapes his outlook) is unwarranted; the system may well never again perform as it did during the long boom after the Second World War, and since the 2007–09 Great Recession it’s been unable to create conditions for a return to higher rates of profit and investment, but that does not mean it could not create such conditions at enormous cost to most people and the rest of nature. Continuing a concerning trend on part of the ecosocialist left, Chaudhary also denies that China is an imperialist power (he asserts at one point that this is a “pure myth”) and refuses to see China for what it is: a fossil capitalist society whose ruling class is weaker than their US rivals but equally an enemy of the global working class.24 In a similar vein, he asserts that “most Global South states are committed to…a form of the politics of exhaustion, but lacking a path beyond the layered caste system of the global economy.”25 This is an unconvincing view of capitalist states that are imperialized by the global system, but whose governments administer capitalism even while signing on to climate justice declarations or criticizing Western imperialism. Alongside these consequential mischaracterizations, some parts of the argument are insufficiently developed. Chaudhary’s case for fighting for “minor paradise” is compelling, but the relationship between such a society, capitalism, and transition to ecosocialism is not clear. Saying that it wouldn’t be “a fully classless” society is reasonable, but why would “features of a fully socialist society… actually be impediments” to “socioecological transformation”?26 How would the “minor paradise” be “a ‘lateral’ project all its own”?27 Here the book’s brief discussions are lacking. Moreover, Chaudhary does not grapple with crucial questions about goals and strategy. For example, what changes in class relations and the organization of production would be required to build the “minor paradise”? What would it take to bring them about? What would the historical bloc forged by supporters of left-wing climate realism need to do? What could probably be won through struggle as reforms under capitalism, and what would require breaking with capitalism and starting a transition? Its discussion of tactics, including attacks on property, is limited, and it seems to advocate a form of green popular frontism in which some sections of capital can be allies of left-wing climate realism.28 The book’s emphasis on the political importance of emotions is smart, and its attention to the global experience of exhaustion is perceptive. Chaudhary thinks that this experience of exhaustion can be channelled into urgently needed organized support for an internationalist politics of left climate realism. Regrettably, The Exhausted of the Earth doesn’t have much to say about how this is possible, and what it does have to say is sometimes unsatisfying. Nevertheless, this book’s ideas about many important issues are powerful and eloquently expressed. People who appreciate that “We have yet to mount the challenge to stop fossil capital, to reverse the extractive circuit, to seize the opportunity found in crisis” and that “crises are not in short supply” would do well to read it.29 Originally published in Midnight Sun.
In recent years, there’s been growing interest in working-class politics on the left in so-called Canada. Inspiration has come from several sources. These include the 2017-18 workers’ rights movement in Ontario, one legacy of which is the Justice for Workers network in that province; strikes such as those of the education workers in the Ontario School Board Council of Unions in 2022; anger at ruthless bosses and landlords; and developments in the US that include a rise in workers unionizing, striking, and organizing to change their unions, along with Bernie Sanders’ version of social democratic politics. But what kind of working-class politics should socialists try to advance? What we talk about when we talk about the working class First, who are we talking about when we talk about the working class? The answer shouldn’t be only about who currently identifies as “working class.” How people think of themselves matters, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that how people act is determined by how they self-identify. Capitalism slots people into groups structured in relation to how goods and services are produced and to other such groups. At root, this is what class is about. It’s not only about your job title or how much money you make. It’s about where you fit in the system of producing everything that keeps society going. What you’re paid to do or what credentials your employer requires aren’t the issue either. The fact that so many jobs now require a university degree just means that more workers have to shoulder the costs of obtaining one (or more than one). Almost no one gets by in Canada by farming for subsistence. Most people don’t own a business, even a really small one. Most of us have to sell our ability to work to an employer in exchange for pay. Most of this wage labour, whether paid hourly or as a salary, is legally regulated economic activity. There’s also working under the table, in what social scientists call the “informal sector,” which is where most workers in Canada without immigration status toil. In many countries of the Global South, most of the working class is in the informal sector. Most workers have very little control over how they carry out their assigned tasks. Others have a bit more. A small minority still have a lot of control over their work processes, which employers are keen to erode using the latest surveillance technologies. Sometimes people who are really working for wages aren’t legally classified as employees. For example, think of a computer programmer hired by a small company as an independent contractor until the company’s owners decide it’s worth the additional costs associated with hiring them as an employee. Or consider drivers for companies such as Uber and SkipTheDishes, whose owners fight against those drivers becoming reclassified as employees because that’d make their labour more expensive and give them basic workplace rights. Such contractors aren’t small business owners like self-employed tradespeople. They’re workers whose incomes are concealed wages. Most people who are working for wages aren’t given any authority over other workers by their bosses. In some cases, though, their place in an authoritarian workplace hierarchy gives them some supervisory power over other workers. This makes them “superior cogs in the machine” controlled by the employer, to quote French socialist Daniel Singer. This isn’t anything new – in the 1800s the skilled workers who formed early craft unions sometimes hired, paid, and fired their helpers. It’s only when people exercise a substantial amount of managerial power, as middle managers do, that they have a qualitatively different relationship to production than other employees. That puts them outside the working class. This way of thinking about class allows us to see how the working class is broader – but also more internally stratified and divided – than most people realize. Operating with ideas about class inherited from an earlier era in the history of capitalism is unhelpful for organizers. Capitalism is still capitalism, but patterns of work have changed since the long economic boom that followed the Second World War. Our understanding of class relations needs to try to grasp them as they exist today. There’s no reason to treat people who work outside of manufacturing, construction, and transportation – or outside the private sector altogether – as not part of the working class. Working at home or having more than a little control over one’s work doesn’t in itself place people outside the ranks of the working class either. Nor does owning a house. Teachers, nurses, social workers, and other workers in “professional” jobs shouldn’t be seen as belonging to a “professional-managerial class” (PMC) distinct from the working class, as some socialists believe. Such workers are not employed to make profits for capital except when they work for private firms. And we shouldn’t confuse the function of workers’ jobs – the purpose of the activity employers pay workers to perform – with their place within class relations. It’s true that teachers and social workers often enforce the discipline of the state against students and clients, respectively. This is harmful, but the conflicts here are generally conflicts within a hierarchically divided working class, not between different classes. That said, what cops and prison guards are paid to do – maintain the capitalist social order with violence – is something else altogether. Those individuals are used to prevent challenges to that order and repress them when they break out, so they shouldn’t be part of unions with other workers. The big picture, then, is that most people in “advanced” capitalist countries (and many other societies) survive by selling their labour power to employers and have little or no managerial authority. There are also unwaged people who depend on the wages of others, and people who are not currently employed. All together, they make up the working class. That some wage earners also make at least a little money in another way, such as by selling goods they make at home, isn’t new. They’re still part of the broad, divided class that labours for capital and the capitalist state or in their shadows. Why the working class is central to a revolutionary socialist politics For those who think the most effective means of changing society is the ballot box, the importance of the working class is primarily a matter of numbers: the working class is everywhere the majority of people. But revolutionary socialists recognize that even the most radical government couldn’t legislate a break with capitalism and the start of a transition towards socialism. This shapes how we understand the working class’s role. The reason the working class belongs at the centre of a socialist politics isn’t that workers are more likely to endorse ideas about radical social change than members of other classes. Nor is it about who’s most willing to engage in militant action today. Some people who depend on a paycheque to get by are up for it right now, but most are understandably hesitant about getting arrested. The reason the working class is central to a revolutionary socialist politics is its potential to transform society in a profoundly democratic, bottom-up way. Its conditions of labour are more conducive to collective action and self-organization than those of peasants or self-employed people. The antagonism between labour and capital that’s built into capitalism pushes workers to struggle together, at the same time as competition and divisions among workers push in other directions. When workers’ struggles escalate and assert the needs of people over profit (or assert the needs of people over state spending restraint), they begin to point toward a different way of organizing society. By withdrawing their labour, workers can make capitalism grind to a halt. When workers take over their workplaces and start running them democratically, they show in practice that we don’t need bosses. This can also hint at how the production of goods and services across society could be reorganized on a democratic and collective basis. As revolutionary socialists, our political horizon is the possibility of breaking with capitalism and starting the transition to a classless, stateless society of freedom with a truly rational relationship between humanity and the rest of nature. Whether we call that goal ecosocialism, communism, or something else is much less important than clarity about the goal itself. It’s because working-class power is the key to making that break with capitalism that the working class matters so much for socialist politics. Roadblocks and roads forward So why hasn’t the working class made that break except on a handful of occasions when the triumphant efforts were sooner or later defeated? Some socialists say the main problem is that workers are misled by leaders who aren’t revolutionaries. While social democratic parties such as the NDP and almost all officials at the top of unions are no foes of capitalism, blaming those parties and leaders doesn’t explain why working-class people usually try to deal with the problems they face in ways that don’t involve collective struggle, let alone revolution. Another idea about why there haven’t been more working-class revolutions, particularly in the Global North, points to a minority of workers in rich countries who are allegedly bribed by the profits of imperialism: a “labour aristocracy.” Socialists who take this idea seriously are likely to turn their backs on whoever they think is in the “labour aristocracy.” To be sure, we should challenge reactionary behaviour and pro-capitalist ideas among higher-paid workers. We should strive to persuade them to act in solidarity with lower-paid, lower-status workers. Elitism, clinging to respectability, and bonding with bosses and other high-status people are real problems. But high-paid workers aren’t the only people who cling to respectability or adopt a boss’s view of the world. Being low-paid and marginalized doesn’t necessarily make people more sympathetic to anti-capitalist politics, let alone to militant action. When we avoid these mistakes and instead recognize how broad the working class is, socialists can develop politics best suited to advancing the class struggle under today’s conditions. We also need to acknowledge how the working class is highly fragmented along lines including income, occupation, industry, home ownership, unionization, and citizenship status. It’s also divided by sexism, racism, cis supremacy, heterosexism, settler colonialism, and other forms of oppression, all of which confer advantages (privilege) on dominant groups within the class. It helps to be humble about the limits of what we know, curious about what we don’t know, and eager to become constructive participants in workplace and community organizing where we can learn from experience. Collectivize everything If the working class today is highly decomposed, with people mostly trying to survive through their families or on their own, we should see our task as helping to recompose the class, building unity and solidarity one step at a time. This means always promoting collective responses to the problems confronting people, in the workplace and beyond. “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?” asks the old labour song “Solidarity Forever,” with good reason. Collective action is the stuff of which class politics is made. It may need to begin in a very modest way – for example, with a group grievance by workers or a group complaint by tenants. Sometimes it’s possible to take the effort up a rung on the ladder of militancy – for example, having a group of workers visit the boss if a grievance is stalled – and we should always have an eye on that possibility. Escalation can’t be proclaimed; it has to be organized step by step. Once people are really in motion, they may take an unexpected leap to carrying out a more militant form of action, but that happens only when they’re already organized and confident. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is a saying as old as “Solidarity Forever.” Although the words are sometimes spoken in unions, this vital principle is rarely taken seriously. What counts as an injury is often contentious, as is the question of why people who haven’t been directly injured should care. For example, many cis people don’t grasp what’s wrong with a government requiring teachers to tell parents when their child uses a different name or pronouns than the ones on record, and many workers who aren’t unionized don’t realize how they’re affected when governments attack the rights of unionized workers. Fostering the widest possible recognition of injustice, and greater commitment to act against it, is an essential aspect of class politics. That isn’t just about persuasion. Persuasion can sometimes get people to attend a picket line or rally against an injustice they don’t know first-hand, but it’s the practical experience of spending time at those sites of struggle – and building relationships in the process – that really changes minds. We need more people to have those experiences if we’re to be able to address not only the exploitation and alienation of the entire working class, but also the various forms of oppression interwoven with them. This means calling for demands that cover all workers – for example, stronger employment standards and better public healthcare – as well as demands tailored to the needs of specific groups of oppressed people, such as employment equity and public healthcare that meets the needs of trans people. And it means recognizing that the masses standing on the same side of the fence between capital and labour are all part of the working class. by David Camfield and Charlie Post
originally published in Tempest In the face of Israel’s renewed settler-colonial violence—the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza—the primary task for socialists inside imperialist countries is building a movement in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. First and foremost, this means building an effective movement to force an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Winning what most of the global Left sees as the “floor” demand will allow us to revive a movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and to organize to end the over $5 billion the U.S. state gives to Israel annually. These struggles will require creating new “infrastructures of dissent”—democratic spaces where activists, new and old, can educate themselves politically, debate strategy and tactics, and organize actions in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for national and social liberation. Building a movement in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinians will put revolutionary socialists in dialogue with activists, here and globally, about what would be required to win a free Palestine. On the Palestinian, Mideast and North African (MENA) and global Left, there are different strategic and tactical perspectives for this struggle. Supporters of socialism from below need to engage in these discussions and put forward an answer to the question, “What would it take to uproot Zionist settler colonialism and achieve Palestinian liberation?” Our answer must be based in both a realistic analysis of the region and our overall strategic vision of working class and popular self-organization and self-emancipation. What follows is an attempt to address the key elements of such an analysis. We need to be honest with ourselves and others that the Palestinians find themselves in a uniquely difficult situation for a colonized people—a situation that explains why their extraordinarily steadfast struggle for liberation hasn’t achieved more since the first Nakba. The Israeli state rules over the entire territory of historic Palestine. In that territory there are two nations: the Israeli-Jewish oppressor nation and the oppressed Palestinian nation. The Israeli state uses the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to control the West Bank and until recently has relied on Hamas to manage Gaza. Members of the Israeli-Jewish nation make up just over half of the population of historic Palestine. Zionism has created a distinctive, perhaps unique, form of settler-colonialism. Zionist colonization is fundamentally different from franchise colonialism, like that of Britain in India or the French in Southeast Asia. In those colonies, the colonizing population was small and the vast majority of the colonized people was exploited, either as peasants or wage workers, by the colonizers. As a result, the colonizers did not develop as a distinct nation in the colonized territory. At the center of the Zionist project, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, is the expulsion of the Palestinian population and the creation of an Israeli-Jewish working class, capitalist class and middle class. Israel is also different from a settler colony like Algeria, where the French pieds-noirs were about ten percent of the population and had the option of moving back to France if they didn’t want to live in an Algeria freed from colonial domination. Israeli-Jews have, for the most part, no “exit strategy” and should be accorded the right to live in Palestine, not as oppressors, but as equal citizens of a single binational society. The Israeli-Jewish working class is not just ideologically committed to Zionism and permeated with anti-Palestinian racism (as journalist Amira Hass observes “We have profound racist contempt for the Palestinians, which we developed to justify, both cognitively and psychologically, our trampling over them”). It’s also not just that Zionist settler-colonial capitalism has constituted the Israeli-Jewish working class in a way that confers advantages (privilege) on its members. What is distinctive about the situation—unique in the world today—is the character and magnitude of these advantages, which have deprived this working class of any interest in fighting to dismantle the social order at this time. Israeli-Jewish workers’ advantages in access to employment, housing, social benefits and land depend on the ongoing expropriation and exclusion of the Palestinian population. These advantages are underwritten by U.S. aid to the Israeli state, which allows the Zionist ruling class to wage permanent war against the Palestinians without having to impose austerity on “their” working class. 1 Asking, “What would Israeli-Jewish workers have to give up if settler colonialism was uprooted?” helps us to see this. How they’d be affected would depend enormously on whether the new society was still capitalist or whether there’d been a break with capitalism and the start of a transition to socialism. If they along with Palestinian workers had taken power, their lives would get better in vital ways. But in any imaginable scenario in which settler colonialism was ended, Israeli-Jewish workers would have to give up a lot. In a decolonized Palestine in which the two nations coexisted on the basis of equality, many Israeli Jews would have to move in order to share the land with Palestinians, including Palestinians living in the diaspora who chose to exercise their right to return. They would no longer have much better job opportunities than Palestinians and access to far superior public services. It’s true that perpetuating settler colonialism ties Israeli-Jewish workers to their own exploiters, to a capitalist system that threatens the future of humanity, and to an oppressive social order in Palestine that fosters monstrous behaviour among the members of their nation. Commitment to Zionism is self-destructive for Israeli-Jews. But unfortunately, the forces that bind Israeli-Jewish workers to Zionist settler colonialism are very strong. This means there is no prospect in the foreseeable future of significant numbers of Israeli-Jewish workers joining with Palestinians in joint struggle against settler colonialism. As a result, those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people cannot subordinate their efforts, including agitation for BDS and the end of U.S. aid to Israel, to attempts to win any substantial minority of Israeli-Jewish workers to anti-Zionism. Palestinian courage and determination rightly inspire people fighting against exploitation and oppression around the world. However, Palestinian workers and peasants alone don’t have the power to win national liberation—in the form of either a democratic, secular capitalist state in historic Palestine or a social revolution that breaks with capitalism and begins a transition to socialism. Why is this? First, the Israeli ruling class has consciously reduced its dependence on Palestinian labor. As a result, Palestinian workers, unlike the Black South African working class, do not have the social power to end apartheid. Second, the Israeli state—supported as it is by a massive amount of U.S. funding and other assistance—has the military capacity to defeat Palestinian uprisings even if these were supported by armies from neighbouring Arab states. The Arab ruling classes have shown for decades that they neither have the capacity nor the willingness to support the Palestinian struggle in any serious way. Are there any forces within Israel that could undermine its ruling class? As veteran Israeli-Jewish revolutionary socialist Moshe Machover argues, the Palestinian minority within Israel is too small to overthrow settler colonialism. What about the rest of Palestine? The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs): are economically dependent on Israel much more than Israel’s economy depends on them. For Israel, the OPTs are mainly a lucrative market and a testing ground for its military and “crowd control” hardware and expertise, which are an important part of its exports. Widespread labour and civil unrest, which could gravely cripple the South African economy, would not have such a serious effect on Israel’s. Machover concludes that “I cannot see any way of overthrowing the Zionist regime without the consent and participation of the Hebrew [what we’ve been calling Israeli-Jewish—D.C. and C.P.] working class.” Socialists must face this difficult reality when we assess strategies and tactics in the struggle against Zionist settler colonialism. To be clear, we are not arguing for limiting the Palestinian struggle, at home and globally, in order to drive a wedge between the Israeli ruling and working classes. Our solidarity with Palestine is unconditional—our opposition to settler colonialism across historic Palestine is a socialist principle. Nor does it mean wishful thinking about winning many Israeli-Jewish workers to opposition to settler colonialism in the foreseeable future. It does mean, though, that as Matzpen, the pathbreaking anti-Zionist revolutionary socialist group with both Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian members, argued in 1978: We think that it is possible to tell the goals of a struggle according to the ways, methods and means used in order to achieve them, and about these we disagree with those in the Palestinian liberation movement who claim that they stand for coexistence of Arabs and Jews, but use ways, means and methods that do not bring them or us closer to this goal. From this perspective, planned or unplanned attacks on Israeli-Jewish civilians are a strategic issue as well as an ethical problem. 2 The killing of non-combatants, although a thoroughly understandable form of the justified rage of the oppressed, does nothing to advance the liberation struggle. Instead, such actions end up causing the grip of settler-colonial ideology to become even more suffocating within the oppressor nation—they bind the Israeli-Jewish masses to their exploiters, rather than, at the minimum, neutralizing them. They are incompatible with the “ways, means and methods” of an anti-colonial socialism from below politics. Short of an end to settler colonialism, the struggles of Palestinians and their allies internationally can win gains that reduce the crushing weight of oppression. Taking the campaigns for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and against U.S. aid to Israel to new levels is vital. Even more crucial is the possibility of a new wave of workers’ struggles across the MENA region, including an uprising in Palestine similar to the First Intifada of the late 1980s that combined mass mobilizations with armed self-defense against the IDF and Zionist settlers. Such an uprising, combined with an end to U.S. and global economic support for Israel, could lead to a significant section of the Israeli-Jewish working class embracing or at least accepting anti-colonial reforms, which could seriously weaken settler colonialism. In the long run, the possibility of victory for the Palestinian national liberation struggle depends on the development of conditions that make it possible to win over at least a sizeable minority of Israeli-Jewish workers to the struggle for a new society. Half a century ago Palestinian revolutionary socialist Jabra Nicola argued: The development of a mass revolutionary movement in Israel depends on the rise of the Arab revolution, both politically and as a material force, that is on the growth of an Arab movement of increasing credibility of actually being able to impose its will, based on a program that is both absolutely intransigent toward all Zionist institutions and recognizing the national rights of the Israeli Jews. This latter point will become significant in Israel only when a movement of revolutionary socialism in the Arab countries begins to gain mass influence so that Israel’s revolutionaries can point to it as an actual real program on which the Arab masses are fighting. Put simply, the struggle to end Zionist settler colonialism should be treated as part of a regional revolutionary strategy. This perspective is not shared by any significant section of the Palestinian movement today. The secular nationalists of Fatah, the dominant group in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), pursued a military and diplomatic strategy. They believed that a combination of Palestinian urban and rural guerilla warfare against Zionist colonization, combined with the hope that the Arab regimes would not only arm the Palestinians but would take military action against Israel, could end Zionist settler colonialism. The failure of that strategy led them to progressively abandon the minimal demand of a single, democratic and secular capitalist state in historic Palestine. In 1993, they signed onto the Oslo Accords in the hope of creating a Palestinian mini-state alongside a Zionist Israel. Instead, as the government of the Palestinian Authority (PA), they became Israel’s willing collaborators in policing Palestinians in the West Bank, while Zionist colonization progressively reduced the territories under their control. The organizations of the Palestinian Left failed to build a powerful alternative to Fatah and ended up tailing them politically. The Islamist party Hamas emerged as an alternative leadership to Fatah and the Palestinian Left groups in the post-Oslo period. Their willingness to continue to confront the Israeli military and settlers and their promise to reform the PA allowed them to win the second PA election in 2006. Despite their demonization as “militants,” Hamas remains trapped in the same strategy as the secular Palestinian forces. As Syrian-Swiss socialist Joseph Daher argues: Hamas, just like the rest of Palestinian political parties, from Fatah to the Palestinian Left, look not to the Palestinian masses and the regional working classes and oppressed peoples as the forces to win liberation. Instead, they seek political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes to support their political and military battles against Israel. So Hamas leaderships have cultivated alliances with monarchies in Gulf states, especially Qatar more recently, and Turkey, as well as with the Iranian regime. Rather than advance the struggle, these regimes restrict their support for the cause to areas where it advances their regional interests and betray it when it doesn’t. While Hamas has continued to carry on military resistance to Israeli aggression, it too has retreated from the demand for a single Palestinian state and conditionally offered Israel the prospect of a “two-state” solution, without diplomatic recognition of Israel. To advance a regional revolutionary strategy, as Daher argues, Palestinian socialist forces “committed to self-organization from below” must be built “within historic Palestine and the region. They cannot do that alone but must do so through collaboration with socialists from Egypt to Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and all the other countries.” Socialists outside Palestine must do whatever we can to start developing political relationships with the new left elements of the Palestinian movement that have emerged. ---- 1. There is a very rough historical analogy between Israel today and the U.S. and Canadian states in the late nineteenth century, where the magnitude of settler colonial privilege meant that at least large sections of the non-Indigenous working class couldn’t have been won to supporting Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism. The U.S. and the Canadian state today are still settler colonial societies, but the interlocked relations of class and settler colonialism have changed a great deal. See Brian Ward, “Are you a settler? Settler-colonialism, capitalism and Marxism on Turtle Island” and David Camfield, “Colonialism and the working class in Canada.” by David Camfield
originally published in Tempest If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins PublicAffairs, 2023 Journalist Vincent Bevins earned attention with his book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. In that study, published in 2020, he documented how, in the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. state, along with its allies and proxies, killed more than one million people in the Global South in anticommunist campaigns of “intentional mass murder” against leftists or people tagged as leftists. That figure doesn’t even “include deaths from regular war, collateral damage from military engagements, or unintentional deaths (starvation, disease) caused by anticommunist governments.” Now in his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Bevins surveys “mass protest explosions” around the world between 2010 and 2020. Already reviewed in The New York Times and other major newspapers, If We Burn was the subject of a double episode of the podcast The Dig, which has a significant audience on the U.S. Left. The book will influence how readers think about politics, so the conclusions that Bevins draws are worth discussing. If We Burn looks at events in “Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile,” drawing on many interviews with participants. Brazil, where Bevins worked, receives particular attention. The book also touches on events in Indonesia, Libya, Syria, and a couple of other countries, as well as Occupy Wall Street. While sympathetic to people who took part in these eruptions, Bevins suggests that too often activists used an approach he sums up this way:
The problem is that, as two very different Brazilian interviewees both put it, “There is no such thing as a political vacuum.” Bevins warns that “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for.” He argues that when mass protests weaken a government or ruler or drive them from office, they create a political vacuum. If protesters can’t fill that vacuum, either by taking office or negotiating reforms that resolve the crisis, right-wing political forces outside or within the state apparatus will move in. The July 2013 military coup in Egypt and the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil are two examples of reactionary outcomes. But “things could have gone differently,” he writes, and such setbacks aren’t inevitable. This is how Bevins explains the influential flawed approach that fed defeat: “a preexisting set of ideological currents, developed in moments of anti-Soviet and neo-anarchist thinking, gained particular momentum in the era of the ‘end of history’ (the 1990s) and then found elective affinity with technological and corporate developments in the 2000s.” Social media platforms (what Richard Seymour rightly calls “the social industry”) facilitate people learning about state repression and mobilizing mass protests. That, along with a crisis of “representative government and perhaps even representation itself,” and the growth of individualism, “proved to be a dynamite combination.” The alternative, Bevins suggests, is to build democratic organizations before social explosions happen: “If you want to help people, if your goal is to confront the problems facing humanity, that means a focus on ends,” not just means, “and it means constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable.” He is sympathetic to “Leninism,” which he sees as as an “organizational philosophy” involving “a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries, strictly disciplined and hierarchically organized.” If We Burn tells the story of the movements it covers in broad strokes. Its extensive interviews give readers a sense of what a selection of participants experienced and thought. It doesn’t snipe at activists from the vantage point of a supposedly neutral observer, but is written in a spirit of learning from the weaknesses of movements (“auto-criticism”) for which some participants gave their lives and many more were injured and jailed in order in order to do better. The book also identifies critical problems with a political approach that has been very influential in the eruptions Bevins studies and beyond, one that perpetuates what Jo Freeman called “the tyranny of structurelessness.” While this approach has lost a lot of influence in the United States and elsewhere in recent years with the rise of politics that treat electing leftists into government as the key to making change, it lives on in other movements, including in Extinction Rebellion and among some autonomists and anarchists. If We Burn recognizes how high the stakes are and how right-wing forces can and will take advantage of the weaknesses and mistakes of uprisings against injustice. And Bevins is absolutely right to argue for the importance of building democratic mass organizations inside and outside workplaces. Missing from If We Burn, however, is deeper analysis of the conditions out of which protests erupted, including the impact of the “global slump” that began in 2008, and of the social and political forces. For example, readers won’t come away understanding how the “June Days” in Brazil in 2013 were part of, as Sean Purdy puts it, “a wider cycle of protests and successful strikes that began in 2012 and continued until the middle of 2014, involving many precarious workers and social movements” or that the PT-led federal government of the time had implemented social reforms within the confines of neoliberal capitalism it accepted, sustained by the highly favorable position of Brazil in world export markets until 2012 and a broad political alliance in Congress with centrist and even conservative parties. There was a deliberate policy of conciliating the interests of the various sectors of capital and their political representatives with the aspirations of the PT’s base in the working class and social movements. Minor weaknesses include its caricatured idea of Leninist “organizational philosophy” severed from the revolutionary socialism of the Bolsheviks and a misleading depiction of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Western Europe. (For a good discussion of Leninism see Charlie Post, “Leninism?”) More important is how If We Burn explains the political limits of the upheavals it examines. It emphasizes activists’ flawed approach without delving into what social and political conditions helped this approach gain influence. Much more was involved than ideas generated in imperialist countries and diffused globally along with—and through—the social industry. What unfolded was molded by the discrediting of the major political projects of the Left in the 20th century—social democracy, “actually existing socialism,” and Third World nationalism—and by the failure (so far) to develop a radical alternative with mass credibility. This situation is in part connected to the decline of the classical workers’ movement, which I’ve described elsewhere as “configurations of workers’ organizations with a strong relationship to at least a small but significant minority of the class that affirm a commitment to the creation by workers of a fundamentally different society.” To the extent that it points to an alternative approach, If We Burn is both sympathetic to the social democracy of the PT and Chilean president Gabriel Boric and to what it mischaracterizes as the “very radical Marxist-Leninist tradition” associated with the former USSR. (For a look at the recent serious setback for the Left in Chile, see Pablo Abufom Silva, “Chile: Triumph of Pinochetism and the Crossroads of the Left.”) The book is marked by the “anti-anticommunist” stance that’s becoming more common today, one that rejects anticommunism (essential!) without at the same time scrutinizing “actually existing socialist” societies and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition associated with them from an emancipatory left perspective. If We Burn assumes that the USSR was socialist and in continuity with the “Bolshevik project,” missing how the kind of society built there under Stalin, which many Marxist-Leninists around the world accepted as socialist, was the product of counter-revolution in the 1920s. What underpins the outlook of If We Burn is the belief that, whether an upheaval can win reforms or make revolutionary change, “a relatively small group” must represent “the people” and “the question is whether the people give this minority permission to speak for them.” This is a vision of social change in which a leading minority must always act on behalf of the masses, as a substitute for them. It’s congenial for today’s democratic socialists and neo-Stalinists. Not considered is the possibility that the exploited and oppressed could create new radically democratic institutions, like the councils (soviets) in the Russian Revolution and other twentieth century upheavals, and take power themselves, led by political organizations committed to winning majority support for this outcome. For socialists with this horizon, what Colin Barker insightfully observes about mass movements is extremely important: What counts is whether there develops, within and across the whole terrain of movement debate, an intransigent wing that has educated itself and its auditors in the dangers of re-subordination and that can offer a vision of going further and aiming higher. Victory for such an intransigent tendency means, not demobilization and disappointment, but still wider mobilization and contestation, up to and including an expansive democratic challenge to the entire power setup. Short of that outcome, the challenge is how to take mass struggle as far as it can go in ways that build up democratic grassroots organizations as counter-power against the capitalist power of employers and the state. This perspective isn’t to be found in If We Burn, although at least one interviewee shares it. For a deeper understanding of many issues If We Burn deals with, and more, I highly recommend the book in which Barker’s astute analysis appears, Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age. This is the text of a handout written for members of the Winnipeg group provisionally named the Trans Solidarity Working Group, aka the “Tuesday Night Group” to suggest the value of organizing against the far right and oppression on a political basis that’s neither liberal nor far left. I’d like to explain why I think a “broad radical” group is possible and desirable. One of my formative political experiences was the movement for abortion rights. In Toronto, the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) was the key movement organization. It organized mass action for the decriminalization of abortion, the defence of freestanding abortion clinics, and against the federal government’s move to recriminalize abortion after the Criminal Code restrictions were struck down by the Supreme Court – key immediate issues at the time. The tactics OCAC used included mass demonstrations and mass direct action to defend the clinics against blockades by bigots (rather than relying on cops). 1 OCAC was guided by a different politics than the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL). CARAL relied on lobbying and legal challenges to try to decriminalize abortion. In Toronto, CARAL was a small group of mostly middle-class women that did lobbying and fundraising. 2 In contrast, OCAC was mostly working-class women, many of whom were lesbian or bisexual, and was an organization of organizers. OCAC would work with CARAL when this was felt to be useful but was always independent. OCAC demanded “not simply the legal right to abortion but the wide range of public resources and services — from birthing centres to multilingual contraceptive and sexuality counselling -- with which women really can exercise the right to control their reproduction.” As they wrote, “Most fundamentally, we fight to win not merely the right to choose, but to transform the social and material conditions under which choices are made. That is why we see the fight for abortion as part of other struggles for equal pay, universal daycare, and an end to sexual harassment and violence.” 3 It actively opposed heterosexism and racism too. It worked with AIDS Action Now! and other groups. OCAC’s politics were radical: they didn’t see ending the legal restrictions on abortion access as anywhere close to enough to achieve bodily autonomy, and aimed for deep- rooted, far-ranging changes in society. In contrast, CARAL’s politics, whose goal was eliminating legal restrictions on abortion access within the existing social order, were liberal. OCAC aimed to organize a wide range of people to participate in its actions to win the immediate demands it was fighting for, regardless of where they stood on other issues. OCAC welcomed people who agreed with its political approach to join regardless of how they identified politically, how well they understood its politics, or how much experience they had. This made it a broad group, which was essential for its success. Many of the leading members of OCAC were socialists (members of Toronto Socialist Feminist Action were central). Fortunately, they understood what OCAC was and wasn’t. Their politics informed their work with OCAC but they didn’t try to get OCAC to adopt explicitly socialist politics or positions that only socialists or other people with far left politics would support. That would have narrowed OCAC and weakened its ability to do what it did so well. Obviously our group is very different than OCAC, but I think that whatever we become we would benefit from adopting its broad radical approach. David 2023-11-10 1. If you’re interested in this history, check out episode 19 of my podcast, Victor’s Children.
2. “CARAL women felt we were the nice people and OCAC were the ruffians,” said former CARAL president Norma Scarborough. The CARAL group in Winnipeg was somewhat different. In the 1980s it worked with the abortion clinic set up by Henry Morgentaler, who under the NDP government of the time was prosecuted for breaking the law. 3. From this document: https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/activism/organizations/ontario-coalition-for-abortion-clinics-ocac/doc-ocac-feministstrugglesstateregulationarticlerfr17-3-toronto-ocr/ Of course, OCAC’s politics weren’t perfect, including on trans issues. Originally published by Tempest
by Ricardo Gabriel and Nevena Pilipović-Wengler A group of Tempest Collective members read Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change by David Camfield. Tempest members Ricardo Gabriel and Nevena Pilipović-Wengler interviewed David about his book’s reflections on just transition, revolutionary organizing, settler colonialism, and more. David Camfield, who lives in Winnipeg, Canada, hosts the socialist podcast Victor’s Children and is a member of the editorial board of Midnight Sun. Future on Fire is his newest book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nevena Pilipović-Wengler: David, thank you again for chatting with us. Everyone [in our discussion group] who read the book found it accessible and clearly written, and also appreciated how it calls upon us to begin revolutionary organizing today. Can you talk about who your intended audience is and why you thought it was important to write this book for this moment? David Camfield: So I started to write the book in the course of the mobilization for the youth climate strike in September of 2019 [part of a global week of protests called by the Fridays for Future movement before a UN Climate Summit], which seems a very long time ago now, politically. But I was really struck as I was participating in this effort that there were so many people involved. Just for context, because it’s so cold in Winnipeg for much of the year, summer is not a time when a lot of people go to political meetings because they’re so desperate to enjoy being outside when it’s warm. Yet despite that, there were remarkable numbers of people coming out on summer evenings to be part of this effort. So I had the sense that something was really shifting and moving. And it was true. The number of people who took part in the student climate strikes of 2019 was pretty remarkable. Some were quite radical and open to radical understandings, but I thought there was a real lack of depth when it came to thinking strategically. And so I thought, well, I could try to contribute to this movement by writing a short book that would make some of the analysis accessible to people who are committed to climate justice in some sense. And to try to think about the question: well, we all agree we need climate justice, we need just transition, but what would it actually take to achieve that? So that’s the genesis of the book. But things have changed a lot in terms of the political context since 2019. Ricardo Gabriel: In the United States, the concept of “just transition” is most often used in nonprofit and progressive, though not necessarily anti-capitalist, spaces. One of the important contributions your book makes is that it explicitly defines the idea of a just transition as a transition away from capitalism and towards an ecosocialist future. Can you say more about the importance of developing socialist visions for a just transition? DC: Okay. So I’ll start with [a quote from the book] about just transition: "[D]rastic and rapid greenhouse gas emission cuts coupled with reforms that reduce injustice—what we can call a radical Green New Deal—represent a minimum emergency program. In rich countries … this needs to include measures to reduce the brutal squeeze global capitalism puts on countries of the South and assist the majority of people in the world to both use more energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Winning such a Green New Deal in many countries would still not resolve the global ecological crisis. It would not by itself uproot capitalism. Nor would it put an end to the many forms of oppression that are part of the existing social order. In the US, Canada and other settler-colonial societies these include the oppression of Indigenous peoples, which is rooted in dispossession from “land in all its forms” … However, winning a genuinely just transition would still be an extraordinary victory that would weaken those sources of harm and open up possibilities for more far-reaching change." So I think that the question then is what kind of struggles would be needed to win a radical Green New Deal? I think that’s the real question and whether we use the language of a Green New Deal or not, that’s not so important, right? But what we’re actually talking about is a sweeping series of reforms. And I do really think that the question then is, what would it take to actually achieve that? And would the kinds of struggles that would be needed create a crisis with revolutionary possibilities in it? The book doesn’t go into that, but if we think about a just transition in the sense that I’m trying to talk about it, then we could think about it as a demand which responds to an urgent need, which should be fought for through mass struggle regardless of whether it’s compatible with capitalism or not. In the history of the socialist Left, one way of thinking about this would be to think about it as a transitional demand. And what we mean by that is something we could talk about. But again, I think we need to speak to this urgent need for a just transition with people who are thinking about climate justice, and discuss what it would actually take to achieve this. Because I think that’s where there are certainly lots of disagreements. NPW: I think that leads to the bigger question of, how do we get to that just transition? Or using your own language, how do we make those transitional demands? Your book argues that this needs to be done through mass movements. Our discussion group resonated with this as socialists, but we also recognize how slippery reforms and demands for just transition can be. It’s difficult to determine whether a reform’s compass points towards a revolution or a further entrenchment of the capitalist state, or a weird mix of both. So what types of reforms or demands for just transition do you think brings us closer to that just transition or revolution? DC: The way that I think about it is that more important than the demands themselves are the methods of action that people engage in order to achieve them. Because I think that’s what’s really critical. I mean, you could have a wonderfully radical demand, which we could see as part of a demand for just transition. And then people think, well, the way to get this is by lobbying, right? There’s not much potential there, but you could have another demand which might be much more imperfect perhaps from our perspective. But if people are actually galvanized and you get thousands of people going into motion around it, then there’s also some potential there. And it’s through the process of mass struggle that people change, that we develop our own capacities and build new forms of organization. We might build the power needed to actually win something. So I would want us to focus more on thinking about the forms of action that are involved than on the demands themselves in the abstract. And I think that’s the compass. I guess this brings up the idea that people often talk about, of non-reformist reforms. And I’m skeptical that such a thing exists. We can assess the different reform demands brought forward, but I don’t think there’s any reform that is inherently non-reformist. I don’t think that’s a problem. It was Rosa Luxemburg who said that the social revolution is the goal and the struggle for reforms is the means to that end. That’s the way I think about it. The question really is: What can we do that will try to get large numbers of people into motion around demands? Because it’s through that process of organizing that people learn and change and can potentially radicalize. NPW: Are there examples of actions that you think embody this or that you feel inspired by in that regard? DC: Well, I do think there was tremendous potential building up in the youth climate mobilizations of 2019, just before the pandemic. And then in Canada, a lot of people who were involved in that flowed into solidarity with the Wetʼsuwetʼen [a First Nation] land defense happening in early 2020. That was quite inspiring, and unfortunately, all that tremendous potential was really snuffed out by the impact of the pandemic and everything that happened after that. There was an international series of mobilizations. And I think we can see now that what the pandemic did was put an end to a world-historic opportunity. Now, the people who participated in that are still there, people had those experiences, and many of those people in the U.S. were probably also involved in the actions in the summer of 2020, and so on. But that’s one experience. I think there’ve been examples in Europe like the Ende Gelände [in German the phrase means “here and no further”] struggle in Germany, which involved mass direct action against coal. That’s inspiring. And then more recently, there have been strike actions in France against the attack on the public pension system; you may have heard how there are some members of the CGT Union (Confédération Générale du Travail, and in English, the General Confederation of Labour) in the power generation sector who turned off the electricity in a politically targeted way against capital and the government, while leaving it on or making it freely available to other people. So that’s something that’s inspiring, and we should try to publicize those examples as much as possible. And one other thing to mention is an experience, which I think is really important and maybe gives us a sense of what might lie ahead. The gilets jaunes (yellow vests), the vast movement in France in late 2018/early 2019, saw large numbers of people involved in very militant action sparked by a neoliberal government bringing in a tax on diesel fuel. This was a movement that had a lot of participants coming out of sectors of the working class and other people who had not been involved in previous anti-austerity struggles—so, not coming out of public sector unions, for example, not being centered in Paris, [or] some of those major cities. A movement that had all sorts of political contradictions in it, and which could have gone to the right politically, but which didn’t, in part because of people on the Left who participated in it and helped the movement to move in a more consistently anti-inequality and climate justice direction. But given the social crises that are happening now and that lie ahead, I think we’re going to see more of those kinds of unexpected, unanticipated forms of social protests that sometimes are politically contradictory or ambiguous, but they’re not fated to be hijacked or directed by the hard and far right. If people like climate justice supporters and other people on the Left can get involved, listen, and constructively participate, they can try to shape them in a different direction. RG :In chapter three, you draw from some important historical examples to make the distinction between being in office and being in power, highlighting the limitations of narrow electoral and legislative strategies. Can you say more about why building mass movements from the bottom up is crucial for averting climate catastrophe and ushering in a new ecosocialist society? DC: Well, I think that mass social movements are crucial because, first of all, otherwise there won’t be a just transition. There’s also no possibility of a break from capitalism without, to quote Trotsky, “the direct interference of the masses in historic events.” So I think we can also say that there may not be much of a transition from fossil fuels at all without mass social movements. What we’re seeing now is the trend toward expanding renewable energy without phasing out fossil fuels. And then the question is, what fills the gap, right? And that’s where unfortunately lies a big threat, such as solar radiation management. It’s easy for me to imagine a scenario in which we see a buildout of renewables without an attack on the power of fossil fuel capital. And then the state moves in to introduce solar radiation management to offset the impact of greenhouse gasses to prevent heating, but it’s a situation where you might have some kind of energy transition that in no way, shape, or form is a just transition. So sometimes people understandably, because of how bad things are, can slip from thinking about just transition to just welcoming any transition at all. I think we need to avoid that political mistake because, as we might see in perhaps parts of Europe more so than in the U.S. and Canada, countries would transition away from fossil fuels in a more thorough way but would still be very much within the framework of capitalism. That can easily make people’s lives worse in all sorts of ways. So to change the character of the energy transition, mass social movements that are infused with climate justice politics are going to be absolutely essential. Capital is not going to take us to a just transition. NPW: No, it is not. Which I think returns us to the movement of the Wet’suwet’en land defense you highlighted that fought against the deeply entrenched, or necessary, relationship between capitalism and colonialism. You incorporate an analysis of settler colonialism in a respectful and insightful way that invites us to continuously hold that analysis as an important perspective and source of knowledge. Can you explain why, from your perspective, it is important for ecosocialists, and countries like Canada and the United States, to take settler colonialism seriously? DC: First of all, settler colonialism is very much part of the societies in which we’re living. It’s a specific form of oppression and it was foundational to how the U.S. and Canada were created and how they exist today. So it’s not just about events in the past. This brings up the question of how non-Indigenous socialists should approach this. And I think the starting point needs to be by learning, by listening, by studying, and by doing that with an awareness that our attitudes about settler colonialism are probably shaped by settler-colonial assumptions, if we’re products of a settler colonial society, right? And if we’re on that side of the line, when it comes to where the oppression is organized, that’s going to tend to shape how we think about these things. Just like, for example, cis men when it comes to gender oppression, our experiences, and perceptions are going to be shaped by living in a society where we don’t experience gender oppression. And, in fact, we are conferred advantages on the basis of our gender. So we need to approach it with a sense of humility and self-awareness. Settler colonialism is a specific kind of oppression. But the struggle to end settler colonialism has implications that are not limited to Indigenous people. Just like, for example, trans liberation has implications for people of all genders. And so the end of settler colonialism would involve a transformation of our relationship to the land, and land understood in the broad sense of the rest of nature that we’re part of. So I think there are all sorts of implications. I mean, every form of oppression experienced by a specific group of people has universal implications. I think that’s true for settler colonialism as well. There’s a lot to be learned there when we think about our vision of liberation and the society that we would like to see arise out of the ashes of capitalism. And then there’s also a strategic issue in the U.S. and Canada, about where Indigenous people are located in relation to the struggle against fossil capital, against extraction. I think that Indigenous resistance has helped prevent things from getting worse by slowing the development of all sorts of fossil extraction projects. That’s strategically important. And I think that because of where Indigenous communities are often located, not in urban spaces, they’re going to be very much in conflict with the expansion of fossil capital. We can see this in lots of places, certainly in Canada. Part of the federal government’s strategy for trying to improve the performance of Canadian capitalism is to increase the extraction of fossil fuels for export to Asia. And so we see the plans to massively export natural gas from British Columbia, which is the background of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en people there against the pipeline. And so there’s a strategic importance [to these struggles]. I want to quote Nick Estes, the Indigenous socialist, with whom I would have disagreements on lots of questions, but who nevertheless says some things I think are really important that I quote in the book. He writes, "Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases we’ve undergone several apocalypses … I don’t want to universalize that experience, it was very unique to us as nations. But if there’s something you can learn from Indigenous people, it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic society. In times of great turmoil and destruction, people didn’t just stop being humans. They didn’t just give up … They did their best to keep alive the nation through genocide." I think that those of us who are not survivors of settler-colonial genocide still can learn from that experience. It’s got implications for how we think about the future. Readers may find a Marxist article on settler colonialism helpful: ‘Are You a Settler? Settler-colonialism, Capitalism and Marxism on Turtle Island’ by Brian Ward in the Winter 2020 issue of New Politics. NPW: Thinking about your answers, and how important organizing is to the mass movements your book calls for, I’m curious—how do you define organizing? DC: I was really involved in the climate justice work here in Winnipeg from the middle of 2019 till later into 2021. It’s amazing how terms like “organizing” can be used—like, everyone wants to say we’re doing organizing, not activism, but what do they mean by that? What gets done doesn’t change, but the language describing it changes. And certainly, that was true for a lot of stuff in Winnipeg. We had this amazing mobilization in September 2019, and then where do you go? And, of course, the pandemic made it more difficult. Some of us were pushing to do work around public transit. To do that work well would mean not just relating to or mobilizing the people who are already climate justice supporters. That means where you work, with whom you work, and what you’re doing has to change, right? The difference between orienting on people who are self-identified supporters of climate action or climate justice, and orienting on people who are bus-dependent—that’s a different way of thinking. It means you have to get out of your bubble. I think that trying to actually build membership organizations, whether they’re workplace or community based, is fundamentally important. And difficult to do, even more difficult to do in the genuinely democratic way that we need to be doing it. But there’s a version that sometimes leads people to a weird refusal to do anything else. So when you have a spontaneous wave of protest, you have some people who are organizing fetishists or something like that who would not want to respond to [mass mobilizations], because it doesn’t fit their model of organizing. That doesn’t mean there isn’t real insight in that—digging in for the long haul, trying to bring people together, and doing it in ways that involve, as much as possible, a non-reliance on staff. Like, in a union context, which is where I have more experience, the goal is trying to build up members so they can do things without being dependent upon staff or full-time officers. I think that is important in community organizing as well, to reject what I call the culture of paid activism. This is becoming more of an issue in Canada than I think it used to be. What’s really interesting is the way the discussion in Canada is overwhelmingly shaped by the discussion in and texts coming out of the U.S. Canada does not have the same kind of nonprofit industrial complex that exists in the U.S. It’s much smaller because there isn’t the same 501(c)(3) here. If you have an organization that’s doing anything like real organizing, it’s very unlikely to have nonprofit status. So there isn’t much of a pathway for people who do their bachelor’s degree and then go work for an NGO that claims to be organizing. That’s way more common in the U.S. than it is in Canada, which means there isn’t a [professional] layer of people who have a material interest in shaping politics because their jobs define that. There are also limitations, such as having way fewer institutions to offer movement education to activists, at least in any way comparable to the system in the U.S. Thus some people look to the U.S. and say, well, this is what we should be trying to replicate here. But then, of course, people encounter critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex. NPW: I’ve organized in those spaces that have a more disciplined, yet also rigid or dogmatic organizing model, and I’ve experienced them as being scared of direct action. You have an interesting section in your book talking about this, whether the possible secrecy of direct actions, such as pipeline destruction, can counter democracy or not. Can you speak more to this point? DC: I think there’s a way that some organizers, especially those who are radicals with a university education, who’re working with people who are very different from them can get very worried that they will drive off the “normal people” [with ideas of more direct or militant actions]. And I think this can lead to operating off of stereotypes, or not recognizing that you need to build real relationships so that there’s a basis to then have discussions about what might be more radical or edgy. I think this may be influenced by experiences back in the seventies, when some people from the far left got factory jobs and preached at people, then rejected that approach and threw out both the good and the bad from that experience, and assumed that socialist politics had to be this one-way thing, or that it necessarily involved a group of people who thought they had all the answers when they inserted themselves into these other places, in order to become the leadership. And there were so many things that were wrong with the way that was done, especially by Maoists in that era, with thousands of people doing that. But that doesn’t mean attempting to engage in more radical politics with people who haven’t yet arrived at that themselves is the wrong thing to do. It’s more about how we do it. And also it’s not 1975, right? We’re not dealing with the same working class. RG: At the end of your book, you write about the need to create new, highly democratic institutions through which the vast majority of people can govern themselves in all spheres of society, and for those institutions to replace those of the existing state. Can you say more about how we begin creating those democratic institutions or practicing democracy in our current organizing struggles? And are there any past or present examples that might serve as guides? DC: I think the kinds of new democratic institutions through which people can govern themselves can only be created by the upsurge of people who are engaged in enormous feats of self-organization. So we cannot create them in embryo now, but we can practice the maximum democracy possible in our organizing today and try to foster democratic self-organization by ordinary people wherever we can. A couple of examples that stand out to me come from workers’ struggles in the U.S. in the last few years. In 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union was on strike, at one point when there was a deal that had been reached, instead of the bargaining committee just accepting the deal and ending the strike, the union continued the strike in order for workers to be able to learn what was in the deal and make a decision about whether they were prepared to accept it. And in the West Virginia strike by teachers and other education workers in 2018, strikers refused to accept an inadequate deal and just return to work when their leaders said that was the thing to do. Instead, the workers continued a wildcat strike. I think those examples should inspire us in terms of the kinds of democracy-in-action that we need to try to promote in workplace and community organizing wherever we can, to embody democratic control from below. Because I think there’s a logic that connects the democratic organizing of our struggles in the here and now with the future creation of democratic institutions that can replace the institutions of the capitalist state. by David Camfield
originally published in Spectre As catastrophic floods in Pakistan and drought in Europe and China highlight the ecological crisis of fossil capital, a debate between Matt Huber and Kai Heron in New Left Review’s Sidecar1 raises important issues for anyone concerned with understanding and responding politically to our times. This exchange draws attention to questions on which there are significant disagreements between what one could call the ecomodernist and (less satisfactorily) Third Worldist degrowth or degrowth-adjacent strands of ecological marxism.2 Although these two perspectives are the most prominent in recent English-language discussions, their limitations call for the further development of a different approach. The issues at stake are not relevant only to intellectuals with a particular interest in ecological questions; everyone concerned with human well-being must recognize that the late Holocene conditions of relative ecological stability within which the capitalist mode of production emerged and spread no longer exist. The worsening ecological crisis of our current historical period within the Anthropocene will make growing nonlinear ecological instability an increasingly important aspect of the totality of the interlocking matrix of social relations. There has been a “permanent, foundational shift in how human society and economy can operate in the future,”3 with wide-ranging effects on capital accumulation, politics, and other aspects of society. What, then, are the issues raised by the Huber/Heron exchange, and why do they matter? CAPITALISM’S PRODUCTIVE FORCESHuber clearly argues, against anti-capitalist degrowth ideas, that “we do need to develop the productive forces – but ecologically. A socialist eco-modernism should make the transformation of production and the productive forces the fulcrum of any new relation to the planet.” Because capitalism fetters the “technological pathways to halting environmental breakdown,” “solving climate change requires new social relations of production that would develop the productive forces toward clean production.” Heron rightly responds that technologies do not exist outside of the social relations within which they are developed, and that “instead of seeing capital’s abolition as the unfettering of productive forces, it is better to view it as freeing the world’s producers to choose from a richer and more diverse array of technologies and socio-ecological relations than capitalist industrialization can offer… It is about adopting appropriate technologies and collectively managing energy and food systems at relevant scales.” Ecomodernist socialism perpetuates a longstanding idea within the marxist tradition that the productive forces themselves are neutral; the problem is the social relations that hinder their deployment for progressive ends. This also tends to involve a narrow conception of what productive forces are – as just technology, and not also forms of social cooperation – and to see them as wholly distinct from the relations of production.4However, if we follow Marx in understanding the productive forces as the productive powers of human labour, then when thinking about these as they exist today we must recognize them as the productive powers of alienated human labour as developed by capital. This is not just a matter of the purposes to which they are put, but also about which technologies and forms of cooperation are developed and in what ways. For example, “precision agriculture” – “a new paradigm of capital-intensive industrial agriculture that integrates digital technologies to improve crop yields and manage populations”5 – and the mass manufacture of digital devices that are difficult or impossible to repair both reflect specifically capitalist imperatives. In this way, ecomodernist socialism brings to mind Raya Dunayevskaya’s observation about the marxism of Second International figures like Kautsky and Hilferding: “there is no longer any sense of breaking the chains of the ubiquitous capitalist machine, nor of… the total reorganization of the relations of men [sic] at the point of production by the men [sic] themselves.”6 Any hint of the critique of technology fetishism also found within the marxist tradition is altogether absent. The very embrace of the ecomodernist label by a marxist is itself remarkable, given that ecomodernism is so clearly a case of bourgeois ideology.7 How we think about forces of production matters today and will become even more important as ruling-class responses to climate change come to rely on technological fixes, including ones like solar radiation management and nuclear fusion that exist barely or not at all.8 The approach taken by Heron is considerably more fruitful for addressing the many questions related to the ecological crisis that involve capitalism’s productive forces. IMPERIALISMIn Climate Change as Class War, Huber frames the climate justice struggle as “a global class struggle between capital and an international working class” and not “a struggle between Global North and Global South.”9 Heron contends that this approach posits a “false choice” between anti-imperialist and class-struggle politics. More broadly, Heron charges ecomodernist marxism with inattention to imperialism, including its ecological dimensions. For example, Huber ignores the question of ecologically unequal exchange, which Andreas Malm defines as “transactions that might seem fair on the monetary surface, but allow rich countries to absorb biophysical resources from the poor and drain their natural endowments,” as in how “the American appetite for hamburger is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon.”10 This charge is generally persuasive, both at the analytical and political levels. Unfortunately, there are also serious problems in Heron’s anti-imperialism, as in those of the Third Worldist strand of ecological marxism more broadly. While rejecting the idea that the working class in imperialist countries is not exploited, Heron endorses theories of imperialism whose handling of unequal exchange and super-exploitation is vulnerable to critique.11 Heron’s contention that workers in the core “benefit from a capitalist system that pits them against their peripheral counterparts” is partially true but inadequate. Access to imported beef, coffee, and other products of ecologically unequal exchange is a reality, but higher profits derived from the operations of imperialism (or anything else) never automatically trickle down into higher wages; the balance of class power is crucial in determining wage levels. For decades this balance has been tilting further away from labour on a global scale as capitalist competition in a world economy organized in part by imperialist relations has intensified. The dispossession of more peasants and other independent producers, the elimination of many relatively-better jobs in both the private and public sectors, and the weakening of welfare state programs as military spending grows have all increased competition among people seeking work for wages. War, oppression, and ecological crisis, all of which are fuelled by imperialism, have also swelled the ranks of people desperate for paid work, whether in the South or, through migration, in the North. At the same time policy changes and technological development have also reduced barriers to capitalists moving the production of many goods and some services from imperialist to imperialized countries. People in imperialist states are encouraged to identify with “their” imperialism, binding workers to their rulers and exploiters. Thus in various ways the working class in imperialist countries loses more than it benefits from imperialism.12 How ecosocialists understand imperialism has clear political consequences for how they approach movement organizing, their stance to states in the imperialist chain that descends from the US to the UK, Germany, France and China to lesser imperialist powers including Canada and Russia, and their orientation to imperialized states.13 Heron is right to call for a politics that can “do the difficult work of developing strategies of struggle and ecological transition that meet the needs of the exploited and oppressed in the Global North in ways that are compatible with demands for colonial reparations, technology transfers, food sovereignty, land back, the lifting of sanctions, the end of occupations and the atmospheric space to develop freely and independently.” Yet ecological marxism must also avoid the pitfalls of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” politics to which Third Worldism often succumbs.14 ECOLOGICAL LIMITSHuber’s critique of “utopianism” in today’s anti-capitalist ecological thought is important but entirely fails to reckon with a scientific truth that Heron puts plainly: “the Global North’s energy and resource use cannot be extended to the rest of the world without exceeding the planet’s biophysical limits.” Climate Change as Class War generally ignores the question of how a just and rapid global transition from fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gas emissions could be carried out. This would have to entail imperialized countries using more energy to meet people’s needs as they simultaneously decarbonized, and consequently a reduction in energy demand within advanced capitalist countries. For marxists to take ecology as seriously as the crisis demands, we must grapple with the findings of Earth System science and think through the implications for immediate climate justice demands and for our global vision of ecosocialism. Materialists ought not to ignore the biophysical limits often theorized as planetary boundaries, which, as Ian Angus helpfully puts it, “can be compared to guard rails on mountain roads, which are positioned to prevent drivers from reaching the edge, not on the edge itself.”15 At stake here is nothing less than how well marxist analyses of ecological crisis and political responses to it measure up to scientific knowledge of that crisis, no matter how unsettling some of its implications may be for some people in the advanced capitalist countries. STRATEGYEcological marxism cannot stop at analyzing the unfolding catastrophe; it must also guide efforts to work towards a transition to ecosocialism. As I hinted above, a great strength of Huber’s approach is its argument for a class-struggle strategy for ecosocialism based on “analysis of the concrete class relationships that both inhibit… transformations or might bring them about” as an alternative to utopian leaps into abstraction when it comes to how transformation could be achieved. His insistence that “we need a climate politics that aims outward, beyond the already converted – towards the exploited and atomized working class” is vitally important. Although Heron agrees in general – while criticizing Huber’s “false choice” between working-class politics and anti-imperialism – the Third Worldist strand of ecological marxism has yet to produce a grounded political strategy like the one that Huber proposes for people in the US in Climate Change as Class War. In that book Huber argues for working-class struggle for a Green New Deal (GND), a “politics of more that explains how much we have to gain from a climate program.” He sees this in terms of “a mass, working-class electoral coalition to win state power” backed up by the “disruptive power” of strike action.16 He then makes a case for a much narrower strategy: rank and file workplace organizing among electrical power workers in order to fight for public ownership of the sector. Class struggle for a GND is, at a general level, a compelling orientation. The content of such a package is important to specify, though. A radical GND in a country like the US needs to include, along with the usual GND reforms, measures to assist imperialized countries with their own just transitions and to cut domestic energy demand – reforms that reflect a decommodifying internationalist climate justice politics of better rather than more, of public luxury and private sufficiency. The strategy of electing a socialist government within the existing state that, with the backing of workers’ direct action, will implement radical reforms as a road to socialism is unrealistic; we should know by now that capitalist state power cannot be so easily taken over and wielded against capitalism and that the working class cannot rule through its alienated bureaucratic institutions.17 Further, in response to Huber’s case for focussing organizing efforts in the electrical power sector, Jonathan Rosenblum rightly argues “a working-class-based climate movement doesn’t have the luxury of time to focus in just one place.”18 One important theoretical task is analyzing the global working class in relation to global capital. As Heron recognizes, the class really is deeply divided and hierarchically stratified as a consequence of capitalist development and various forms of oppression. Yet the working class also has common interests that are, contrary to Heron, “an objective reality” because of how people are located within capitalist social relations. These provide a material basis for the convergence of struggles and the forging of solidarity between people whose conditions are in some ways quite different. So oriented, ecological marxist theory can guide the practice of mass movement climate justice politics in both paid workplace and community organizing. In addition to digging in where people work and live, its supporters need to be ready to intervene constructively in unexpected upsurges of protest and resistance like the “yellow vests” movement in France in 2018-19 and the uprising against racism in the US in 2020. Even if ecological concerns are not what is putting people into motion, ecological marxists risk irrelevance if they cannot respond to and become part of social eruptions in ways that allow them to build political relationships and help people to make connections and bring out the ecological dimensions of struggles against injustice.19 WHAT WOULD ECOSOCIALISM BE?Although it does not surface directly in the Heron-Huber exchange, the character of the society that ought to replace capitalism is also a central question for ecological marxism today. Here ecomodernists and Third Worldists have more in common than they may realize. Huber sees China today as not fully capitalist because of its state-owned enterprises, and Heron seems to think that at least under Mao China was socialist.20 The common ground between marxists in the traditions of Karl Kautsky and Mao Zedong is the belief that state ownership of the means of production makes a society non-capitalist even when the state is not made up of new radically democratic institutions of self-government through which the working class runs society, “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor” hailed by Marx in the Paris Commune and dubbed a “semi-state” by Lenin in State and Revolution.21 Breaking with capitalism and beginning a transition to ecosocialism is not a short-term prospect anywhere in the world today, but this does not mean that the character of ecosocialism or what would be required to begin to reconstruct society in its direction are irrelevant matters. They shape what we can call, following Daniel Bensaid, a regulatory horizon that, through many mediations, ought to inform theory and action today.22 Ecological marxists in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and William Morris insist that the prerequisite for initiating this revolutionary transition would be a self-emancipatory rupture that establishes the democratic rule of the direct producers themselves, not the taking of state power by a party acting on their behalf. Of course, the dire state of the world ought to encourage collaboration among adherents of all strands of ecological marxism wherever possible. Areas of agreement deserve to be recognized, and disagreements kept in proportion. Yet we cannot afford to ignore what can be learned from the historical experiences of social democracy and Stalinism in the twentieth century,23 especially as we confront the horrors of the twenty-first. ---- NOTES & REFERENCES [1] Matt Huber, “Mish-Mash Ecologism,” https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mish-mash-ecologism; Kai Heron, “The Great Unfettering,” https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-great-unfettering. Quotations here from Huber and Heron are from these articles unless otherwise noted. [2] Huber embraces the term “socialist eco-modernism” in his contribution. Heron proposes “an anti-imperialist eco-communism,” but since that can be interpreted as suggesting that other ecosocialisms are not anti-imperialist I do not find it a useful descriptor. The former strand is commonly found expressed in articles in Jacobin, while the latter is frequently found in Monthly Review. An earlier intervention in this debate is John Bellamy Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution,” https://monthlyreview.org/2017/11/01/the-long-ecological-revolution/. [3] James Meadway, “Economics for the Anthropocene,” https://jamesmeadway.substack.com/p/economics-for-the-anthropocene. Meadway’s piece is most useful for its forceful stress of the significance of the shift, which one can appreciate without endorsing every argument within it. [4] Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 17-18. [5] Ryan Stock and Maaz Gardezi, “Make Bloom and Let Wither: Biopolitics of Precision Agriculture at the Dawn of Surveillance Capitalism,” Geoforum 122 (2021), 194. [6] Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 163. [7] On this critique, see Gareth Dale, “Technology Fetishism in Marxist Theory and Environmental Policy,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W664kUtWSkY, and for ecomodernism in the words of some of its outspoken champions, see “The Ecomodernist Manifesto,” https://thebreakthrough.org/manifesto/manifesto-english. [8] Jessica Murray, “Half of Emissions Cuts Will Come From Future Tech, Says John Kerry,” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/16/half-of-emissions-cuts-will-come-from-future-tech-says-john-kerry. Given the influence of Holly Jean Buck on ecomodernist marxists, Simon Pirani’s response to her After Geoengineering is worthy of note: “Getting Geoengineering Back to Front,” The Ecologist, https://theecologist.org/2019/nov/12/getting-geoengineering-back-front. [9] Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War (London: Verso, 2022), 34. [10] Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020), 52. [11] See Charlie Post, “Explaining Imperialism Today,” forthcoming in Spectre. [12] Here I build on Charles Post, “Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour Aristocracy,’” Historical Materialism 18 (2010), 24-25. [13] For a promising start to thinking about imperialism as a feature of contemporary capitalism, see Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Complex Stratification in the World System: Capitalist Totality and Geopolitical Fragmentation,” Science and Society (84.1), 2020. [14] For example, see Simon Pirani, “China’s C02 Emissions are Soaring. But in Monthly Review’s World They are ‘Flattening,’” https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2021/04/13/chinas-co2-emissions-are-soaring-but-in-monthly-reviews-world-they-are-flattening/; David Camfield, “Building Eco-Socialism: A Review of Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal”, https://www.tempestmag.org/2021/07/building-eco-socialism/; and, more broadly, Barnaby Raine, “Left Fukuyamaism: Politics in Tragic Times,” https://salvage.zone/left-fukuyamaism-politics-in-tragic-times/ and John Clarke, “When My Enemy’s Enemy is Not My Friend: Campism in Dangerous Times,” Spectre 5 (2022). [15] Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press), 74. [16] Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 38, 203, 219. [17] David McNally, “What is the Meaning of Revolution Today? Beyond the New Reformism,” https://spectrejournal.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-revolution-today/. For a detailed discussion of socialist strategy in the US, see Kim Moody, Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action and the New Socialist Movement in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). [18] Jonathan Rosenblum, “A Successful Climate Movement Must Be a Working-Class Movement,” https://jacobin.com/2022/05/working-class-movement-huber-climate-change-as-class-war-review. [19] I discuss mass movement climate justice politics in Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change (Oakland: PM Press, 2023). [20] Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 68; Kai Heron, “Unearthing the Fraught History of Chinese Communism,” https://jacobin.com/2020/01/unearthing-the-fraught-history-of-chinese-communism. [21] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm; VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm. [22] Daniel Bensaid, Le pari melancolique (Paris: Fayard, 1997). [23] Here I mean Stalinism in a broad sense, referring to the societies built along the lines first established in the USSR beginning in the late 1920s and the political currents that saw the USSR as socialist, at least under Stalin. Maoism is “an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism,” as Elliott Liu puts it in Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction (Oakland: PM Press, 2016, 3). by David Camfield
originally published in Midnight Sun The recent pact between Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberal Party, whereby the NDP has pledged to prop up the Liberals in office for three years, is a disaster for “official politics” in this country: the political possibilities that are treated as legitimate by the mainstream media and the major political parties, and so by most people most of the time. Left critics like Nora Loreto are correct that the NDP has tied its hands with this deal; once signed, the party brass will be determined to stick with it. Such critics are also on point when they argue that the agreement’s proposed reforms are small; that accepting means-testing for dental care, as the deal does, is a blow to the cause of universal social programs; and that it’s wrong for the NDP to effectively commit to vote for higher military spending and other regressive measures in future budgets. Yet worst of all, perhaps, is how the pact will further winnow the Anglo-Canadian parliamentary field into two blocs: the “liberal establishment” defined by the Liberals, with the NDP as their junior partner and the Greens on the fringe, and the “conservative opposition” made up of the Conservatives and the People’s Party. The very existence of the NDP, anchored in the desire of most of the union officialdom for a “political arm” to complement the “economic arm” of unions’ collective bargaining efforts, has long meant there’s been some space in official politics for ideas to the left of the Liberals’. This has been true in spite of the pro-capitalist politics of the NDP leadership. The party’s brass has never imagined social change beyond an expanded welfare state and some publicly owned enterprises in a society that remains capitalist; today it accepts neoliberal capitalism as the unchallengeable framework within which to seek minor reforms. But NDP supporters have often argued that their party is needed because the Liberals are, like the Tories, a party of Bay Street. Some make the case that workers need a party of our own, independent of the parties of employers, much as workers need unions because our interests are different from those of bosses. This was the point of the famous “Mouseland” allegory shared by Tommy Douglas, the NDP’s first leader, a tale of a town of mice who kept electing cats to govern them. From a socialist perspective that sees the struggles of working-class people, manifested through social movements, as the key to changing society, that social democratic vision is lacking in lots of ways – above all, in how it treats elections and the “proper channels” of capitalist democracy as primary means of working for change, and tacitly or explicitly endorses capitalism as the way to organize society. Nevertheless, the existence of the NDP as a self-described alternative to the parties of business has preserved a faint element of class antagonism – us vs. them – within official politics. This has long been valuable for people whose politics are to the left of the NDP’s, whether we’ve realized it or not. The more the NDP subordinates itself to the Liberals in office, as it does with the new so-called confidence-and-supply agreement, the more it encourages millions of working-class people to think about politics in terms of that “liberal establishment” vs. “conservative opposition” binary – a far cry from “the two parties of Bay Street” vs. “the party of ordinary people.” Since both the Liberals and Conservatives are parties of the capitalist ruling class, what the NDP is doing will make it still more difficult for independent working-class political ideas in so-called Canada to have influence at the level of mass politics, where the radical left today has virtually no impact whatsoever. The NDP is unlikely to become an acceptable alternative governing party in the eyes of the ruling class, which currently has no need for another one. Chasing that dream at the price of political independence is a dead end for the NDP and a problem for radicals. To see what’s wrong with defining the political terrain in terms of “liberal establishment” vs. “conservative opposition,” we have only to look south of the Canada-US border, where two right-wing parties brand themselves in those terms and have a death grip on official politics. Wherever liberals administer a system that makes the lives of many working-class people worse and there’s no visible opposition from the left, more of the people who are suffering end up accepting the poisonous ideas of the lib-bashing right, as a way of explaining their pain and lashing out against its perceived causes. By pledging to support the Trudeau government, the NDP isn’t helping just the Liberals. It’s possible that the deal’s biggest winners, in time, will be forces further to the right. |
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