I am finally getting around to reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate (2014) and, by and large, I like what I am reading. Yet, as some of you will know, it was Ms Klein’s misinterpretation of the Chicago School’s approach to economics that inspired my own seminar on the Chicago School six years ago, and was partly responsible for my migration from International and Area Studies to the Economics Department at Berkeley. My problem, then as now, is with an insufficiently grounded account of social subjectivity in general and of “neoliberal” social subjectivity in particular. Ms Klein often mistakes correlation for causation and therein ignores the mechanisms driving social subjectivity. Thus, for example, persons associated with the oil industry — Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, wealthy and not so wealthy — are found to be more likely than others to deny climate change. The implication is that economic dependence on oil brings people to deny its effects on the environment. Ms Klein cites the old Upton Sinclair observation: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” (46). So true. At the same time, Ms Klein devotes many pages to following the money trail from industry through think tanks whose fellows flood media outlets with a climate change denial “science” that for-profit “news” is only all too happy to peddle to unsuspecting, naive consumers. That is to say, along with the economic interests of those dependent in one way or another on fossil fuels, there is also a marketing angle that packages and sells climate denial. These mechanisms — the one existential, the other ideological — at their extremes are mutually exclusive. Where the first theorizes a material causal mechanism, the second theorizes a cognitive-aesthetic mechanism. We will return to these mechanisms in a moment.
Finally, however, Ms Klein invites us to reflect critically on the common ideological roots informing both “disaster capitalism,” the subject of Ms Klein’s ground-breaking Shock Doctrine (2007) and climate change denial: free market fundamentalism.
“In America today we are regulated down to our shower heads, to our light bulbs, to our washing machines,: [Marc Morano] says. And “we’re allowing the American SUV to die right before our eyes.” If the greens have their way, Morano warns, we will be looking at “a CO2 budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet, monitored by an international body.”
Next is Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with burdensome lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act fishing expeditions. He angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like Anderson Cooper’s frat boy doppelgänger, likes to invoke 1960s counterculture icon Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires. . . . The first step to [doing] that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way” (32).
In the end, thinks Ms Klein, we are in a “Battle of World Views.” One of these views of the world is “hierarchical” and “individualistic,” the other is “egalitarian” and “communitarian” (36). Sweetening the message by making CO2 regulation sound “hierarchical” or “individualistic” has not worked (58). Moreover, it reinforces values that undergird both disaster capitalism and climate change denial. The answer, therefore, is instead to “make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right” (59).
So what is so problematic in Ms Klein’s treatment of social subjectivity? I think that it is problematic because it suggests that the social subjectivity of climate change deniers is qualitatively and substantially different from the social subjectivity of climate change activists when the social subjectivity of those on both sides of this issue is structured by the same social mediations and social forms. A more satisfying account of the mechanisms driving the climate change struggle would therefore need to embrace a more nuanced approach to the shared social subjectivity driving the conflict.
Happily, Ms Klein takes us a good distance toward recognizing this shared social subjectivity insofar as all agents on all sides are embedded in and shaped by the capitalist social formation, a formation that, as Ms Klein rightly recognizes, is at the root of the problem not only of climate change itself, but also of the ideology of climate change denial. That is to say, albeit in an un- or undertheorized form, Ms Klein calls veiled attention to the substantive, material, and not merely ideological relationship between capitalism, climate change and climate change denial.
In order to construct a more rigorous theory of this intimate relationship, however, we will first have to critically interrogate the couplets hierarchical/egalitarian, individualistic/communitarian, that anchor so much of Ms Klein’s analysis. Our aim here is not to “sweeten the pot” so to speak, but rather to explore the social formation giving rise to the historically and socially specific form of domination displayed in climate change and climate change denial. Although an account reaching back to the fourteenth century might be helpful for a variety of reasons, for our purposes we need go back no further than the seventeenth century, to the English Enclosure Movement, and to the social alignments that emerged in the wake of that movement.
Viewed from the ground up, it is clear that social actors in the seventeenth century had good reason, grounded in Common Law, to resist the privatization of formerly public or common space. It had been their right, recognized in the courts, as far back as there are records, to live on and earn their keep from the landlord’s estate so long as they fulfilled their modest tenant obligations. The privatization of the landlord’s estate and the monetization of their contract with the landlord therefore struck them as a clear violation of established custom and law. Viewed from the ground up, we could say, following EP Thompson, that these residents of the commons exhibited what could be called a “communitarian” posture towards their relationships with one another and even towards their symbiotic relationship to the landlord and the land. And, yet, no one would mistake their outlook as “egalitarian.” To the contrary, social actors in the seventeenth century still displayed great respect for social and economic hierarchy.
What we might call the “egalitarian” outlook appears at two points in history. It appears, first, in those small, mobile, semi-migratory communities identified by cultural anthropologist Nurit Bird-David (1992,1994). Such communities are small enough and their members sufficiently dependent on one another to display patterns of differentiation that nevertheless remain flexible and even interchangeable. Moreover, without the luxury of a fixed, permanent geographical location, there is little opportunity for one clan to capture the efficiencies of outsiders for their own use. Mobility reinforces equality. The other point in history where something like “egalitarianism” appears is in the seventeenth century itself, where theories of natural law and natural right begin to proliferate and challenge the natural privilege and natural difference that otherwise seemed so transparent and obvious for anyone who cared to see. Such notions of equality, however, were grounded in the emerging “personhood” of capital, the notion that all people are equal, but all do not contribute equally to the national treasure. Not blood or private property, but the creation of physical, material wealth was coming to serve as the legal standard of right. This migration of personhood from individual persons of different social standing to the impersonal, universal, and, by definition, equal units of capital made it increasingly possible for two individuals, different in social standing, to petition courts based not on “private law” (privilege), but on the impersonal and universal right of money. It would take another century for this notion of personhood to be written into constitutions, where, irrespective of the actual physical conditions or social standing of any specific individual, the law could proclaim, at least, that all people were “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
But, what this means is that — unless we are contemplating the kind of equality common to migratory communities up to and including contemporary times — we are contemplating an equality that is inseparable from the capitalist social formation itself; abstract, socially disembedded and disembodied personhood before the law. This form of equality — immortalized in hundreds of constitutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — also points to “communities” and “communalism” grounded not in traditional rights and obligations, which, of course, have been swept away, but in the shared, common laws and regulations governing the international production and exchange of commodities. At a deep level that mediates and governs all of our social relations, it is these laws and regulations, and the institutional arrangements that give flesh to their variable enforcement, that accounts for the shared world within which climate change denial and activism take shape.
One of the reasons why it is so difficult to theorize the causal mechanisms driving climate change denial and why, therefore, we are so often thrown back upon ideology critique, is that our interpretations are insufficiently nuanced to grasp the shared social landscape and social mediations driving both climate change denial and activism. No one has witnessed communalism as powerful as the communalism of right-wing religious communities in the US or UK. In France and Germany, by contrast, this same right-wing communalism is more likely to take on explicitly fascist overtones. On some level, these communities are fiercely anti-capitalist. They desire the forcible intervention into the marketplace to eliminate the viewpoints, practices, and relationships that they deem evil or harmful to the nation. But since they misrecognize the agent responsible for their hardship — race, nation, religion, gender preference, ethnicity, language — their anti-capitalism is easily inflected in support of surface economic relations, which are beside the point. “The issue is not the issue.”
But, we could with equal justice take aim at individualism. Individualism might have pointed, as it surely did once point, to as yet unassimilated particularities. So, for example, we are intimately familiar with the destruction entailed in global economic, regulatory, and legal integration, whose success is predicated on the annihilation of local and regional particularities out of step with globalization. When we defend local and regional particularities — or, as GWF Hegel called them, individualities — we are not contrasting this individualism to the equally prominent sense of communal responsibility visible in non-capitalist societies. Rather are we pointing out that it is only within the capitalist social formation that both communalism (e.g., fascism) and individualism (e.g., consumer choice) are bent toward the social reproduction of capital.
This form of analysis, however, also invites us to cast a critical eye back on our own interpretive framework, the standpoint of our critique. Clearly from what has already been said it makes little sense to abstractly defend egalitarianism and communalism or pit them against hierarchy and individuality — as though these were not highly nuanced and, on some level, arbitrary surface inflections arising out of deeper social mediations. Similarly, therefore, when we recognize how capitalism is systemically bound to destroy the climate, we are liable to become side-tracked by issues of individualism and communalism, egalitarianism and hierarchy that fail to grasp the mechanisms driving the conflict. This conflict, I would argue, is not between capitalism and something else, but is a conflict within capitalism between contrasting social forms all of which may legitimately be called “capitalist.” When we point beyond capitalism, by contrast, we are noticing the possibility within capitalism of taking steps out of capitalism. What will the individual or the communal look like from the other side? What will equality or social differentiation look like from the other side? Beyond hints or educated guesses, it is difficult to say.
Yet, like every fundamental social transformation in history, it is clear that whatever life looks and feels like from the other side, it will take the shape that it does because of the decisions we make today, from where we are situated now, which is not on the other side, yet. Ms Klein’s sense of the steps we need to take to mitigate and reverse the worst effects of climate change and her appreciation for the kind of life that might emerge on the other side — better than the current configuration — display a keen understanding of how capitalism is composed and why it necessitates climate change. We could only wish that her theoretical frame was somewhat more rigorous.