Seeing Red Over the Climate Crisis
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140 SEEING RED OVER THE CLIMATE CRISIS: ECOSOCIALISM AS EMERGENCY BRAKE A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Stanislaus In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History By Ken Boettcher May 2021 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL SEEING RED OVER THE CLIMATE CRISIS: ECOSOCIALISM AS EMERGENCY BRAKE by Ken Boettcher Signed Certification of Approval page is on file with the University Library Dr. Philip Garone Date Professor of History Dr. Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt Date Associate Professor of History Dr. Marjorie Sanchez-Walker Date Professor of History © 2021 Ken Boettcher ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Abstract ................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER Introduction: Through the Portal of the Pandemic ........................................ 1 Within the Civilizational Climate Crisis ................................. 16 I. A Short History of the Crisis ……....................................................... 30 The Science Behind the Consensus…….................................. 33 Expanding Crises ..................................................................... 37 II. Fossil-Fuel-Funded Denialism & the Failure to Act ............................ 49 The Forces Behind Denialism .................................................. 58 Lies & Tricks….. ...................................................................... 66 Rightwing Reshaping of the Media Landscape ....................... 72 The Military View .................................................................... 77 III. Behind the Destruction – EcoMarxism as Antidote ............................. 83 ...................................................................... Marx as Promethean?................................................................ 96 The First Century After Marx .................................................. 113 Western Trends Since the 1960s .............................................. 130 The Metabolic Rift .................................................................... 135 IV. Fast and Furious Acceleration .............................................................. 139 The Withered ‘Soul’ of Neoliberal Capitalism ........................ 161 Political and Social Effects ....................................................... 171 Workers and Neoliberalism ...................................................... 178 iv 83 V. Revolutionary Opportunities from Nature’s Revenge ....................... 188 Opposing Capital’s Globalism .............................................. 201 Pulling the Emergency Brake .............................................. 215 Walter Benjamin’s Revolutionary Romanticism .................. 218 Reification, Praxis and Organization .................................... 228 The Revolutionary Agenda ................................................... 236 Epilogue: The Era of Tipping Points & Revolutionary Rage ....................... 239 Hope, But Not Optimism ....................................................... 246 Bibliography ................................................................................................. 256 v ABSTRACT The pandemic and the civilizational climate crisis in which it is embedded are crises of capitalism far worse than they might have been without the austere rule of neoliberal capitalists and politicians, who publicly scorn society and the working people who built it. Working for decades to eviscerate government and free themselves of taxes and regulations that inhibit profit-making, they greatly accelerated capitalism’s bringing of all life on Earth to the brink of extinction. This thesis sketches the history of the crisis, the history of fossil- fuel-industry-funded denialism that has so effectively forestalled action that might have prevented it, and the history of a powerful oppositional Marxist ecology that represents a path to a truly sustainable Earth. It explains the furious acceleration of the crisis over the past four decades as the result of a vengeful, ruthless effort of the ruling elements of US society beginning in the mid-1970s to boost their rate of profit and protect their positions of power and privilege—at the price of vast economic damage to working people and incredible devastation to Earth and its atmosphere. Further, it postulates that a peaceful revolutionary movement is needed to enforce immediate demands to “pull the emergency brake” and end the destruction—and that nature, in wreaking its own revenge against capitalism, may well assist workers to accomplish this historic task. Finally, it sees the possibility that we are now entering an era of disastrous climate tipping points that could build a revolutionary rage to finally end capitalism and establish an ecosocialist society. vi Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. 1 —Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. INTRODUCTION THROUGH THE PORTAL OF THE PANDEMIC The past we seek to leave behind through the portal of the pandemic is our world today, beset by so much more than the devastating Coronavirus pandemic. As this thesis will show, we face a profound nexus of problems arising from the profit motive in production and the destruction of labor and nature it promotes, giving rise to the climate crisis and a Gordian knot of interrelated economic, political, ecological and epidemiological crises. A Marxist analysis situates the climate crisis within this cluster of systemic emergencies,2 introduced through the lens of the integral COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to frame the class-based genesis of the climate crisis and to show the crucial need for a class-based solution to build a sustainable society and replace the destructive capitalist order increasingly recognized by contemporary environmental history as the root of these crises.3 This introduction lays out the approach of the paper and its chapter-by-chapter 1 Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 214. 2 Economic depressions, systemic racism and sexism, militarism and war, poverty and hunger, environmental crises, to name a few. 3 As Ted Steinberg, a leading environmental historian, writes in the fourth edition of his widely used text, Down to Earth, Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 246: “Interpretations of the planet’s ecological woes that eschew an examination of capitalism and instead single out ‘human action’ fall short. To point a finger at diverse aspects of postwar life such as population growth, cities, and fossil fuels without looking for the driving force behind the individual changes ignores the systemic factors structuring human interactions with the planet.” 1 2 sketch of climate-crisis literature. That the coronavirus pandemic comes to us thanks ultimately to capitalist globalization and the priorities of production for the private profit of a tiny wealthy minority is clear. Globalization of commodity chains is driven by growing worldwide competition, which motivates capitalists to engage in a global race to the bottom in pursuit of the lowest wages and cheapest resources with the fewest governmental safeguards for labor and the environment. This was not feasible until the last quarter of the twentieth century when transportation costs dropped thanks to bigger ships and improved shipping technology—and until automation, roboticization, and computerization developed to the point where minimal training can make a relatively uneducated, low-wage peasant productive enough compared to US workers to increase profits despite increased transportation costs.1 Globalization moved in lockstep with these factors not necessarily because some US politicians pushed it, as many rightwing voices rail, but because the very US capitalists venerated as job producers, facing increased competition, sought to bolster their profits by reducing their US workforces—and technological developments showed them a pathway to do so. Some politicians no doubt believed their own propaganda that globalization would be good for US workers rather than tossing millions out of work—creating the US rust belt in the process—but many chose to serve the profit interests of those who fueled their political campaigns, happily making it easier to ship US jobs overseas. Some insist that COVID-19 is the “China virus,” feeding anti-Chinese racism and 1 For further discussion of the dynamics of globalization, see Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (London: ZED Books, 2020). 3 violence, simply because it first appeared there. However, viruses like COVID-19—and the 1918 Flu pandemic, first identified in Kansas before killing 50 million people around the world1—can occur almost anywhere, especially where humans have disturbed the balance of nature. This includes capitalism’s feedlots and slaughterhouses or in “wet markets”— fresh produce markets that hose down their stalls, only some of which also sell wild animals. As an article by John Bellamy Foster and