[lbo-talk] NYRB review of Naomi Klein

[Carrol Cox]

Global warming is not, of course, going to be avoided. And of course it will
be disastrous. The real issue is not avoiding global warming but achieving
social relations (or political power) that will enable the mass of humanity
to survive in such a world. A year or so ago Richard Ohmann wrote on the
Radical Caucus (MLA) list that he _had_ believed, and taught, that
capitalists believed their own ideology, but that he was beginning to doubt
that. Capitalists (at least the very big capitalists) were assuming that
their grandchildren  could (say) build a wall around Manhattan to keep out
the flood. Capitalism is not going to be overthrown soon enough for some
vague (or precise) form of "eco-socialism" to reverse global warming, but if
we want human survival we will need to smash capitalism relatively soon. And
note: there is no _necessary_ political link between climate awareness and
working-class liberation through the overthrow of capital. Environmental
activists with rare exceptions do not move on to an active opposition to
capitalism or even to an active participation in the defensive struggles of
the working-class.

I fear that while leftists must continue to participate in and if possible
lead eco-struggles (such as the XL Pipeline struggle) there is no reason to
expect that such struggles will 'flow over' into class struggle. The
struggle against global warming does not (in itself) trigger class
consciousness or even radical reformism.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Marv Gandall
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:42 PM
To: Progressive Economics; LBO; Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
Subject: [lbo-talk] NYRB review of Naomi Klein

Here's a link to another review of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything,
this one by Elizabeth Kolbert in the latest New York Review of Books.
Kolbert is sympathetic to Klein's analysis of the climate crisis and her
indictment of governments and liberal green organizations who offer
misleading reassurances that the looming catastrophe can be averted without
major changes to the status quo. 

But, like some other reviewers, Kolbert thinks Klein's various proposals to
resolve the crisis through "managed degrowth" and "regeneration" are too
vague to be meaningful or, like carbon taxes, "hardly seem to challenge the
basic logic of capitalism." This, despite the fact that Klein is avowedly
anticapitalist, although her rhetorical flourishes about "changing
everything" though a global environment movement are arguably aimed not at
the system's overthrow as purging it it of its rapacious, unregulated,
"neoliberal" character which thwarts popular efforts to rid it of its worst
features.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/can-climate-change-cure
-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nybo
oks+%28The+New+York+Review+of+Books%29
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