Blitz history: On Lenin and the Russian Revolution

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Blitz history—How Lenin changed the world

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Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

by John Bellamy Foster | Editor } Monthly Review

(Jul 01, 2017)

Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg.(The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 240)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”¹ Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.In these circumstances, Soviet Russia, completely isolated, faced a massive counterrevolution, with all the major imperialist powers intervening on the side of the White Russian forces in the Civil War. “Socialism in one country,” the basic defensive posture of the USSR throughout its history, was thus to a large extent a geopolitical reality imposed on it from outside. This was evident beginning with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia was forced to give up much of the territory of the Tsarist Empire, followed soon after by the Treaty of Versailles, which sought to isolate it still further.It was imperialism—not in its generic sense, encompassing the whole history of colonialism—but in its connection to the monopoly stage of capitalism, as V. I. Lenin employed the term, that constituted the differentia specifica of twentieth-century capitalism, determining the conditions of both revolution and counterrevolution. Already by the late nineteenth century, the contest over colonies that had shaped much of European conflict since the seventeenth century had been replaced by a struggle of a qualitatively new kind: competition between nation-states and their corporations, not for imperial zones, but for actual global hegemony in an increasingly interconnected imperialist world system.² Henceforth revolution and counterrevolution would be interrelated at the level of the system as a whole. All revolutionary waves, concentrated in the periphery where exploitation was most severe, since intensified by the extraction of surplus by the metropolitan powers, were revolts against imperialism, and were confronted by imperialist counterrevolution, organized by the core capitalist states.³Complicating this was the fact that a privileged sector of the working class in the advanced capitalist states could be seen as benefitting indirectly from the drain of surplus from the periphery, giving rise to a “labor aristocracy,” a phenomenon first singled out Frederick Engels and later theorized by Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.⁴Still, in 1967, a half-century after October 1917 and a hundred years after Capital, it was not unreasonable to assume, amid the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in China, that world revolution would gradually gain the upper hand, and that the revolutions that had occurred, not only in Russia, but also in China, Cuba, and elsewhere, were irreversible. The twentieth century had already proven itself the bloodiest in human history. Yet it was also a period of enormous advances in human liberation. If the forces of world counterrevolution were gathering, their victory, even in the short run, was far from certain. As Herbert Marcuse declared in the opening pages of his 1972 Counterrevolution and Revolt:

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime. Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called “communist” or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries. Cruel persecution prevails in the Latin American countries under fascist and military dictatorships. Torture has become a normal instrument of “interrogation” around the world. The agony of religious wars revives at the height of Western civilization, and a constant flow of arms from the rich countries to the poor helps to perpetuate the oppression of national and social liberation…. The counterrevolution is largely preventative and, in the Western world, altogether preventative…. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution.

Today, a hundred years after the Russian Revolution and a century-and-a-half after Capital, conditions have changed. It would appear that the clock has been turned back, and the forces of global counterrevolution have triumphed. Most of the emancipatory movements that seemed to be gaining ground in the 1960s, primarily in the periphery, have been roundly defeated.

Nevertheless, the material contradictions of capitalist development—particularly in the form of the planetary ecological emergency—are in many ways more serious than ever before. Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 pulled the veil away, it is abundantly clear that the present phase of global monopoly-finance capital, with its unprecedented levels of inequality, its stagnation and instability, its civilization-destroying bellicosity, its destruction of the environment, and its new forms of political-economic reaction, threatens the future not only of this generation, but that of all generations—the very survival of humanity. As Eric Hobsbawm concluded in his history of the twentieth century, “the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”⁵

Reaction on a World Scale

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f imperialist counterrevolution triumphed in the end over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey, in desperate brevity, of the whole history of imperialist geopolitics over the last century.

The period from the mid-1870s through the First World War marked a qualitative break in the logic of capitalist development. Contemporary observers as early as the 1870s spoke of the “new imperialism,” to refer to a rapid increase in colonial acquisitions, the rise of new imperial powers, and a reemergence of inter-imperialist rivalries.⁶ It was in this phase of the system that monopoly capital—capitalism dominated by giant industrial and financial firms—arose. Germany and the United States were rapidly entering the new age of heavy industry and advancing by leaps and bounds into the monopoly stage of capitalism, while Britain lagged behind in both respects.⁷ British hegemony over the capitalist world economy, dating from the Industrial Revolution, while still unrivalled in scale, was increasingly threatened under a new multipolar order of competing core states. The last three decades of the nineteenth century were years of economic stagnation, known in Europe at the time as the Great Depression. But it also represented an age of dramatic shifts in the locus of capitalist power.

Observing these trends, proponents of imperialism in the major capitalist states developed the new pseudoscience of geopolitics, which focused on the struggle for hegemony in the world system. Geopolitics can be understood in Clausewitzian terms as war by other means, often leading to the actual outbreak of hostilities. It had its origins primarily in the United States and Germany in the 1890s, marking the rise of both nations as imperial powers. In the United States, the new outlook was best represented by Charles Conant’s “The Economic Basis of Imperialism” (1898) and Brooks Adams’s The New Empire (1902)—both of which projected U.S. political-economic hegemony over large parts of the globe, particularly the Pacific.⁸ The founder of the German school of Geopolitik was Friedrich Ratzel, who in the 1890s coined the term Lebensraum, “living space,” as an imperative of German policy. “There is in this small planet,” Ratzel wrote, “sufficient space for only one great state.”⁹

However, what can be called classical geopolitical analysis only appeared in the interwar years and during the Second World War. Its leading British theorist was Halford MacKinder, a former director of the London School of Economics and for twelve years a Member of Parliament from Glasgow. In Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), he wrote: “The great wars of history are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations.” The object of capitalist geopolitics was to promote “the growth of empires,” ending in “a single World-Empire.”¹⁰MacKinder was famous for his doctrine of the Heartland. Hegemony over what he called the World-Island (the interlocked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa) and through it control of the entire world, could only be achieved, he argued, by dominating the Heartland—the enormous transcontinental landmass of Eurasia, encompassing Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. The Heartland was “the greatest natural fortress on earth,” because of its inaccessibility to the sea.¹¹ In the new Eurasian age, land power—not sea power, as in past centuries—would be decisive. In Mackinder’s famous dictum:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.¹²

Mackinder’s geopolitical strategy was influenced by the Russian Revolution, and used to justify imperialist counterrevolution. In 1919, the British government appointed him high commissioner for South Russia, responsible for organizing British support for General Denikin and the White Army in the Civil War. Following the Red Army’s defeat of Denikin, Mackinder returned to London and reported to the government that, although Britain was right to fear German industrialization and militarism, German rearmament, then ostensibly blocked by the Treaty of Versailles, was essential. For Mackinder, Germany constituted the chief bulwark against Bolshevik control of Eastern Europe, and thus of the geopolitical Heartland.¹³

Mackinder was not the only influential interwar figure to promote such beliefs. It was this same logic that led Neville Chamberlain’s government two decades later not so much to “appease” Nazi Germany, as to collude with it, in the hope that Germany would turn its guns eastward, toward the USSR. Indeed, the Treaty of Versailles, as Thorstein Veblen explained, was a “compact for the reduction of Soviet Russia,” which while “not written into the text of the Treaty,” could “be said to have been the parchment upon which the text was written.”¹⁴

In Germany, the leading geopolitical theorist of the 1930s and ’40s was Karl Haushofer, the mentor of Rudolf Hess (Deputy Führer in the Nazi regime), and himself a key adviser to Adolf Hitler. He saw the British and U.S. empires as the main threat to Germany, and thus advocated the creation of a great Eurasian intercontinental power bloc, with Germany entering into an alliance of convenience with Russia and Japan to destroy Anglo-American power. With the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, he wrote: “Now finally, the collaboration of the Axis powers, and of the Far East, stands distinctly before the German soul. At last there is hope of survival against the Anaconda policy [the strangling encirclement] of the Western democracies.”¹⁵

In the United States, the foremost geopolitical thinker of the age was Nicholas Spykman. In America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and his posthumous The Geography of Peace (1944), Spykman opposed Mackinder’s Heartland, land-based geopolitical strategy, in favor of one that emphasized sea power. By controlling the coastal rimlands of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and the Pacific, the United States could encircle the Eurasian Heartland, then controlled by the USSR. Spykman insisted on the need for an American-British hegemony over the globe, and was primarily concerned in The Geography of Peace with preventing the USSR from establishing “a hegemony over the European rimland.” The Soviet Union, he argued, would be unable to defend itself against “a united rimland.”¹⁶ Spykman’s geopolitics exerted a powerful if largely forgotten influence on U.S. foreign policy with the advent of the Cold War, including George Kennan’s strategy of “containment,” as well as the grand designs of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1943, Mackinder underscored the global stakes for the U.S. empire, declaring in Foreign Affairs that “the territory of the Soviet Union is equivalent to the Heartland,” over which it could not be allowed to retain control.¹⁷ Washington’s initial geopolitical strategy adopted during the Second World War was intended to extend U.S. hegemony outward beyond what the Council on Foreign Relations called the Grand Area of the British and American empires, to further encompass continental Europe, the Middle East, and the rimlands of Asia.¹⁸ In the new anticommunist crusade, revolutions were to be fought all across the globe, but especially in these strategic areas. Not only the Council on Foreign Relations, but a succession of leading Cold War and post-Cold War strategic planners, such as James Burnham, Eugene Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Wolfowitz, would go on to argue in similar terms.¹⁹ Washington would ultimately set itself the wider objective of dominating states and regions throughout the world, as well as controlling strategic resources, capital movements, currencies, and world trade. However, the full extent of U.S. imperial ambitions was to become apparent only in the period of naked imperialism following the demise of the Soviet Union.²⁰

The clearest official statement of this new global ambition was the Defense Planning Guidance for 1994–1999 (portions of which were leaked to the New York Times in 1992) overseen by Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense for policy. This became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, commonly associated with the rise of neoconservatism. Intended as a direct response to the disappearance of the USSR from the world stage, it explicitly declared that the new goal of U.S. geopolitical strategy would be the indefinite prevention of the reemergence of any rival power that could threaten American supremacy—that is, the pursuit of a permanent unipolar world. “Russia,” the document stated, “will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.”²¹It thus continued to be the principal long-run target.

As Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, put it in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard, “the United States…now enjoys international primacy, with its power directly deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent”—Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The goal, he argued, was to create a “hegemony of a new type” or “global supremacy,” indefinitely establishing the United States as “the first and only truly global power.”²² The new world order then envisioned was one of U.S. unipolar power, backed by nuclear primacy. Regime change in mid-level states considered of geopolitical significance and outside the U.S. empire—even those previously tolerated in the context of the Cold War—became essential. Here the goal was not to create stable democracies—an objective never considered viable in key strategic areas such as the Middle East—but rather to destroy “rogue states” and unassimilated political blocs, particularly on the outskirts of the Eurasian Heartland and in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, that could threaten the security or hinder the expansion of the U.S. empire. The blowback from this grand strategy of destruction is most evident today in the rise of the Islamic State.

The U.S. imperial grand strategy for the post-Soviet era first outlined in the Defense Planning Guidance had as its governing assumption the eventual resurgence of hostilities with a now capitalist Russia, as that nation inevitably recovered. In anticipation of this, the U.S. hegemon and its NATO allies expanded further into Eurasia and surrounding regions, engaging in wars in the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, tightening the noose around Russia over the quarter-century from 1992 to the present.²³ This same grand imperial strategy included the suppression of all anti-systemic movements and forces in key strategic areas in the periphery, as well as attempts to constrain China militarily and politically.

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the New World Order originally declared by George H. W. Bush took on the additional ideological mantle of the War on Terrorism introduced by George W. Bush. This justified a strategy of permanent war and “humanitarian interventions” throughout the global periphery. In its efforts to assert total dominance over the Middle East following the 2003 Iraq War, the United States, backed by NATO, designated Iran and—particularly after the 2011 invasion of Libya—Syria as the leading Middle Eastern states sponsoring terrorism, making their demise its principal objective. Yet the real reasons for regime change in the Middle East and elsewhere, as Wolfowitz had intimated in the early 1990s to General Wesley Clark, were strictly geopolitical.²⁴

The Obama administration, together with its NATO allies, brokered the 2014 coup in Ukraine, putting in place a pliant far-right government headed by a Western-friendly oligarch, thereby proclaiming in no uncertain terms the New Cold War against Russia. This reflected a strategic campaign in the works since at least 2007, when Vladimir Putin defiantly declared that “the unipolar policy model [of absolute U.S. global supremacy] is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”²⁵ The long counterrevolution against the Soviet Union was thus extended into a geopolitical struggle aimed at a reemerging, now capitalist, Russia. The latter struck back by absorbing Crimea (formerly part of Ukraine) following a referendum; seeking to stabilize conditions in eastern Ukraine on its border, particularly with respect to Russian nationals; and intervening to counter the U.S.-Saudi-sponsored proxy war against the Assad regime in Syria—thereby succeeding in preventing the toppling of its main Middle Eastern ally.

Remarkably, the new Trump administration, representing a somewhat different faction of the U.S. capitalist class—beholden particularly to the fossil-fuel industry and financial sector and drawing heavily on a lower middle-class, ultra-nationalist ideology—initially signaled a geopolitical shift, aimed at détente with Russia. This was to be accompanied by a policy of concentrating on countering the Islamic State, Iran, North Korea, and China as the principal global antagonists—a view associated with the “clash of civilizations” strategy of Samuel P. Huntington, as opposed to the Eurasian Heartland approach of Wolfowitz and Brzezinski.²⁶The incoming administration made it clear that China, with its rapid economic growth and increasing regional power, represented the main threat to U.S. hegemony (and U.S. jobs), and hence the main target of its imperial strategy.

Nevertheless, the greater part of the U.S. military-industrial complex, from the Pentagon to the intelligence agencies to the major security contractors, has strongly resisted this shift away from Russia as the principal antagonist—to the point of insinuating treason on the part of the Trump administration for its preliminary discussions with Russian officials, portrayed as collusion with the enemy. Hence, the administration has been subject to an unprecedented number of leaks from within the national security state, and has come under investigation for its communications with Russia during the campaign and the post-election transition. For dominant sections of the U.S. ruling class, it remains essential that Russia, occupying the Eurasian Heartland, and still constituting the chief nuclear rival, should remain the principal target of U.S. grand strategy. The stability of the NATO alliance, and the entire U.S. strategy of permanently subordinating Europe to its rule, is founded on the New Cold War with Russia.

For the U.S. ruling class, the strength of the U.S. economy, the supremacy of the dollar, and hence the financial power of Washington, are all seen as dependent on U.S. global primacy. Although U.S. GDP growth and that of the other core capitalist countries has stagnated, with the West losing ground economically to a rapidly developing China, the increasingly irrational geopolitical strategy coming out of Washington still has as its objective a unipolar world order. This is to be leveraged by an array of strategic assets, including the combined weight of the triad alliance of the United States and Canada, Europe, and Japan under U.S. leadership; geopolitical dominance; military and technological power; and financial supremacy via the dollar.

The aggressiveness of this imperial strategy can be seen in the U.S. pursuit of absolute dominance in nuclear weapons capabilities under the rubric of the “modernization” of all three legs of its nuclear arsenal. The object is to take full advantage of the fact that a weakened Russia fell behind for years in maintaining and modernizing its own nuclear weaponry, allowing the United States to pull decisively ahead. U.S. nuclear strategy is now predicated on the “death of MAD” (Mutual Assured Destruction), that is, the demise of the entire system of deterrence.²⁷ Those formulating U.S. strategic doctrine increasingly believe that the United States is currently capable, while using only a small part of its nuclear arsenal, of destroying enough nuclear weapons of an opponent in a first strike (or counterforce attack)—even in the case of Russia—to prevail in a nuclear confrontation. In short, Pentagon planners now believe the United States has attained “strategic primacy” in nuclear weapons capability.²⁸ This would make a first strike against any enemy on Earth “thinkable” for the first time since 1945, when Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties—in what was a political rather than a military decision, and the first real act of the Cold War.²⁹ Ominously, with the imminent death of MAD, the other side too, in any period of nuclear tensions, has greater incentive to strike first, lest it be destroyed completely by a U.S. hegemon no longer restrained by fears of its own destruction in the event of a first strike on its part.³⁰

“An essential feature of imperialism,” Lenin wrote, “is the rivalry between a number of great powers in the striving for hegemony.”³¹ Such dangers are redoubled over the long run when one capitalist nation, as in the case of the United States in the twenty-first century, seeks to create a unipolar world or superimperialist order.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States showed itself to be the world’s most destructive nation, killing millions in wars, invasions, and counterinsurgencies across the globe.³² This bloody legacy continues into the present: over a single Labor Day weekend, on September 3–5, 2016, the United States dropped bombs on or fired missiles at six largely Islamic countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In 2015, it dropped a total of over 22,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria alone.³³ No country opposed to the United States can afford to underestimate the level of violence that could be directed at it by the U.S. hegemon.

Revolution: The Human Future

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the twentieth century, revolutions were as much a product of resistance to imperialism as of class struggle. They most often broke out, as Lenin observed, in the “weak links” of the imperialist world system.³⁴ Inevitably, they were met with counterrevolution organized by the great powers of the capitalist core. Even a small uprising was likely to be seen as a threat to world capitalist rule, and was usually crushed with brutal force, as in Ronald Reagan’s massive 1983 invasion of the tiny island of Grenada, or the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The dominant ideology invariably blames the enormous human cost of this warfare on the revolutions themselves, rather than on imperialist counterrevolutions, which are rapidly erased from historical memory.

In 1970, MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy were invited to the inauguration of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected as the head of a Popular Unity government, which promised to introduce socialism in Chile, starting with the nationalization of U.S. corporate assets in the country’s major industries. Magdoff and Sweezy were longtime friends of Allende’s, and their analysis at the time of his inauguration focused on the dangers arising from the close connections between the United States and the Chilean military, suggesting the strong likelihood of a military coup to be sponsored by Washington and carried out by Chile’s praetorian guard. Imperialism, they warned, respects no rule of law where challenges to the existing order are concerned. And indeed, a bloody seizure of power, led by General Augusto Pinochet and engineered by the United States, occurred three years later, taking the life of Allende and thousands of others.³⁵

All of this reaffirms the historical truth that there can be no socialist revolution—however it should arise—that is not also forced to confront the reality of counterrevolution. Indeed, in judging revolution and counterrevolution over the last century, particular stress must be put on the strength and virulence of the counterrevolution. The struggles and errors of the revolutionists are only to be seen in the context of this wider historical dialectic.

From history textbooks to the mainstream news media, the dominant ideology in the West today presents the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an utter failure from beginning to end. The USSR, we are told, collapsed under the weight of its own internal inefficiencies and irremediable defects—though these accounts often claim almost in the same breath that it was U.S. power and military might that “won” the Cold War. It is undeniable that the history of the USSR was rife with historical tragedies and social and economic contradictions. Much of the enormous human potential that the Russian Revolution unleashed was exhausted in the devastating Civil War—in which the White Russian forces were directly supported by troops and arms from the West. The Soviet Union later fell prey to Joseph Stalin’s extreme collectivization and brutal purges.³⁶

Nevertheless, the USSR over its history also underwent extraordinary industrial development, the conditions of the working class generally improved, and the population enjoyed certain economic securities lacking elsewhere. It was the Soviet Union that saved the West in the Second World War, beginning with the dramatic defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad—the turning point of the war—and the victorious westward march of the Red Army (though the war also took a huge toll: the USSR lost more than twenty million people). The Soviet Union’s very existence inspired movements for human liberation in the third world. With the growth of the Soviet bloc and the region’s economic and technological accomplishments, the position of the USSR in the world seemed secure well into the 1970s. Its central planning system, despite certain inefficiencies and a tendency to degenerate into an overly bureaucratized command economy, offered a new and in many ways successful approach to economic and social development in noncapitalist terms.

But the USSR failed to carry forward the socialist revolution. The postrevolutionary society that emerged generated its own bureaucratic ruling class, the nomenklatura, which had arisen from the inequities of the system. The USSR’s stubborn refusal to allow independent development in Eastern Europe (albeit viewed as a necessary buffer zone against Western invasion) was made clear in the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.³⁷

In the end, the USSR lost its inner dynamism, relying too much on extensive (the forced drafting of labor and resources) rather than intensive development (dynamic productivity from technological innovation and the unleashing of creative forces). It was exhausted by a decades-long military, political, and economic contest with the West, forced to compete in a massive arms race that it could ill afford.³⁸ For all their superficial promise, Mikhail Gorbachev’s misconceived and indeed disastrous glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) policies massively undid the system, rather than reforming it. Although the loss of Eastern Europe, symbolically marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, contributed to this unraveling, it was the Soviet nomenklatura that proved to be the system’s final undoing, as numerous representatives of the Soviet power elite and a corrupted privileged intelligentsia, in alliance with Boris Yeltsin and the West, chose to dissolve the post-revolutionary state from above—believing that their own individual and class interests would be better promoted under capitalism.³⁹

Yet in spite of all of this, the experience of the USSR, as the first major socialist break with the capitalist system, continues to inspire and to inform revolution in the twenty-first century. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution—though it took an entirely different form and is now itself imperiled by a counterrevolution supported by the United States—could hardly have been imagined without the Soviet example.⁴⁰ The USSR’s extraordinary economic, technological, and cultural achievements are not easily erased in the historical memory.⁴¹

The world capitalist crisis of the late twentieth century eventually engulfed the core capitalist nations themselves as they sank from the 1970s on into economic stagnation—partly counteracted by the financialization of accumulation in the 1980s and ’90s, which, however, ended with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007–09. With the full onset of stagnation since the Great Financial Crisis, the positions of the working class and lower-middle class in the advanced capitalist states have plummeted. Inequality has reached its highest level in history, both within nations and globally.

So severe is this seemingly endless crisis that it has destabilized the state within the core capitalist countries. The ruling classes of the various capitalist countries have responded to the growing popular disenchantment by resurrecting the radical right as a kind of ballast for stabilizing the system. Neoliberalism has thus partially given way to neofascism, or what may prove to be a neoliberal-neofascist (or center right/radical right) alliance. In the United States, science itself is rejected as a threat to capitalism, with climate-change denial now the official stance of the Trump White House.⁴² The “destruction of reason” is thus complete.⁴³

Reactionary forces have of course gained the upper hand many times before in the history of the class struggle, only to give rise to new revolutionary waves. Commenting on the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Engels observed in Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution:

A more signal defeat undergone by the continental revolutionary party—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that?… Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outward institutions, from satisfying itself…. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning.⁴⁴

Although the historical conditions have been transformed many times over, these sentiments still ring true. Given today’s ever more desperate need for social change, it is necessary “to begin again from the beginning,” creating a new, more revolutionary socialism for the twenty-first century. Massive, democratic, egalitarian, ecological, revolutionary change in both center and periphery represents the only truly human future. The alternative is the death of all humanity.

Notes

↩Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 138–39.
↩The analysis differs here from most world-systems theory, which sees the successive hegemonies of the Dutch, the British, and the United States within the world-economy as essentially the same, denying the distinctiveness of the monopoly stage of capitalism.
↩For a history of revolutionary waves in the periphery up until the 1980s see L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The third world Comes of Age (New York: Morrow, 1981).
Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1939),13–14, 106–08. On the shift of revolution to the third world and its impact on Marxian theory, see Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 147–65.
↩Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1994), 585.
↩R. Koebner and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 175.
↩E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin, 1969), 172–93.
↩Charles A. Conant, “The Economic Basis of Imperialism,” North American Review 167, no. 502 (1898): 326–40.
↩Ratzel quoted in Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: Putnam, 1942), 31.
↩Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919), 1–2.
↩Halford Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs 21, no. 4 (1943): 601.
↩MacKinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 186.
↩Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Viking, 1943), 464.
The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal (Edmonton, CA: Éditions Duval, 1995).
Geography of Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), 43, 57.
↩Halford Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” 598.
The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1968).
↩See John Bellamy Foster, “The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review 57, no. 8 (January 2006): 9–14.
↩John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Atlanta, GA: Clarity, 2017), 275–77.
↩Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic, 1997), 3, 10, 30–39.
↩Richard N. Haass, “The New Thirty Years War,” Project Syndicate, July 21, 2014, http://project-syndicate.org.
↩General Wesley K. Clark, Don’t Wait for the Next War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 37–40.
↩Putin quoted in Johnstone, “Doomsday Postponed?” 277.
↩Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
↩Johnstone, “Doomsday Postponed?” 275.
The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Conflict,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): 3–14, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (2016): 42–54; Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKenzie, and Theodore A. Potsoi, “How US Nuclear Force Modernization is Undermining Strategic Stability: The Burst-Height Compensating Super-Fuze,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1, 2017.
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996).
These Nuclear Breakthroughs Are Endangering the World,” Foreign Policy in Focus, April 26, 2017.
↩Lenin, Imperialism, 91.
↩On casualties from U.S. warfare in the periphery, especially those of civilians, see John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 316–36. On the history of U.S. military interventions from 1945 through the 1980s, see Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2015?” Council on Foreign Relations blog, January 7, 2016, http://blogs.cfr.org; Tom Engelhardt, “You Must Be Kidding: The Exasperating, Never-Ending Sprawl of American Empire,” In These Times, September 23, 2016.
↩Lenin, Imperialism, 9–14.
Monthly Review 22, no. 7 (December 1970): inside covers.
↩Ian C. D. Moffat, The Allied Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
The Soviet Century (London: Verso, 2005), 348, 385; Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 57–58; Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 113–33.
↩Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Perestroika and the Future of Socialism,” Monthly Review 41, no. 10 (March 1990): 1–13 and 41, no. 11 (April 1990): 1–7. The USSR operated on its production possibilities curve, relying on full capacity production, while monopoly-capitalist economies like the United States operated below their production possibilities curve, with substantial idle capacity. This meant that the former always faced a choice between “guns and butter,” while the latter was able to expand both guns and butter—and indeed more butter because more guns. This understanding was the basis of “military Keynesianism.” On the role that U.S. military Keynesianism played in forcing the USSR into a damaging arms race, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 2–9.
↩Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the conditions that led to the downfall of the Soviet state, but it was Yeltsin who carried out the coup de grâce, going so far as to initiate an armed overthrow of the elected parliament, cheered on by the capitalist West.
↩This is quite literally so, since many of Chávez’s revolutionary ideas, as he often acknowledged, were drawn from Mészáros’s critique of the “capital system,” which encompassed the USSR, in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995).
↩See Amin, Russia and the Long Transition.
Neofascism in the White House,” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017): 1–30.
↩Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1980).
↩Frederick Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 9–10.

About this author

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER serves as editor of Monthly review. Professor Foster, who teaches at University of Oregon, received his PhD from York University. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. Professor Foster's teaching encourages in-depth, critical exploration of history and ideology, equipping students to learn to learn on their own.

E-mail: jfoster@uoregon.edu

The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything

by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Crossing the River of Fire

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]1 All of which is clearly meant to convey in no uncertain terms that climate change literally changes everything for today’s society. It threatens to turn the mythical human conquest of nature on its head, endangering present-day civilization and throwing doubt on the long-term survival of Homo sapiens.

The source of this closing circle is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation. Hence, the change that Klein is most concerned with, and to which her book points, is not climate change itself, but the radical social transformation that must be carried out in order to combat it. We as a species will either radically change the material conditions of our existence or they will be changed far more drastically for us. Klein argues in effect for System Change Not Climate Change—the name adopted by the current ecosocialist movement in the United States.2

In this way Klein, who in No Logo ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in The Shock Doctrine established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism, signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.3 The reason is climate change, including the fact that we have waited too long to address it, and the reality that nothing short of an ecological revolution will now do the job.

In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is no longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with human survival over the long run. We need therefore to reconstruct society along lines that go against the endless amassing of wealth as the primary goal. Society must be rebuilt on the basis of other principles, including the “regeneration” of life itself and what she calls “ferocious love.”4 This reversal in the existing social relations of production must begin immediately with a war on the fossil-fuel industry and the economic growth imperative—when such growth means more carbon emissions, more inequality, and more alienation of our humanity.

Klein’s crossing of the river of fire has led to a host of liberal attacks on This Changes Everything, often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous, having little to do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their primary purpose is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with received opinion. If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the conversation. However, her message represents the growing consciousness of the need for epochal change, and as such is not easily suppressed.

The Global Climateric

The core argument of This Changes Everything is a historical one. If climate change had been addressed seriously in the 1960s, when scientists first raised the issue in a major way, or even in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when James Hansen gave his famous testimony in Congress on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first established, and the Kyoto Protocol introduced, the problem could conceivably have been addressed without a complete shakeup of the system. At that historical moment, Klein suggests, it would still have been possible to cut emissions by at most 2 percent a year.5

Today such incremental solutions are no longer conceivable even in theory. The numbers are clear. Over 586 billion metric tons of carbon have been emitted into the atmosphere. To avoid a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in global average temperature—the edge of the cliff for the climate—it is necessary to stay below a trillion metric tons in cumulative carbon emissions. At the present rate of carbon emissions it is estimated that we will arrive at the one trillionth metric ton—equivalent to the 2°C mark—in less than a quarter century, around 2039.6 Once this point is reached, scientists fear that there is a high probability that feedback mechanisms will come into play with reverberations so great that we will no longer be able to control where the thermometer stops in the end. If the world as it exists today is still to avoid the 2°C increase—and the more dangerous 4°C, the point at which disruption to life on the planet will be so great that civilization may no longer be possible—real revolutionary ecological change, unleashing the full power of an organized and rebellious humanity, is required.

What is necessary first and foremost is the cessation of fossil-fuel combustion, bringing to a rapid end the energy regime that has dominated since the Industrial Revolution. Simple arithmetic tells us that there is no way to get down to the necessary zero emissions level, i.e., the complete cessation of fossil-fuel combustion, in the next few decades without implementing some kind of planned moratorium on economic growth, requiring shrinking capital formation and reduced consumption in the richest countries of the world system. We have no choice but to slam on the brakes and come to a dead stop with respect to carbon emissions before we go over the climate cliff. Never before in human history has civilization faced so daunting a challenge.

Klein draws here on the argument of Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, who indicates that rich countries will need to cut carbon emissions by 8–10 percent a year. “Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy,” Anderson writes, “has squandered any opportunity for ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”7

Instead of addressing climate change when it first became critical in the 1990s, the world turned to the intensification of neoliberal globalization, notably through the creation of the World Trade Organization. It was the very success of the neoliberal campaign to remove most constraints on the operations of capitalism, and the negative effect that this had on all attempts to address the climate problem, Klein contends, that has made “revolutionary levels of transformation” of the system the only real hope in avoiding “climate chaos.”8 “As a result,” she explains, we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slightly ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things that we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die….

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ur economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….

Because of our lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.9

Of course, “the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism” is simply a roundabout way of pointing to the fundamental logic of capitalism itself, its underlying drive toward capital accumulation, which is hardly constrained at all in its accumulation function even in the case of a strong regulatory environment. Instead, the state in a capitalist society generally seeks to free up opportunities for capital accumulation on behalf of the system as a whole, rationalizing market relations so as to achieve greater overall, long-run expansion. As Paul Sweezy noted nearly three-quarters of a century ago in The Theory of Capitalist Development, “Speaking historically, control over capitalist accumulation has never for a moment been regarded as a concern of the state; economic legislation has rather had the aim of blunting class antagonisms, so that accumulation, the normal aim of capitalist behavior, could go forward smoothly and uninterruptedly.”10

Confronted with Klein’s powerful argument in This Changes Everything, liberal pundits have rushed to rein in her arguments so that her ideas are less in conflict with the system. No matter how insanely exhorbitant the cost, the inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of capitalism is not to be questioned.

To be sure, Klein herself occasionally seems to lose sight of this basic fact, defining capitalism at one point as “consumption for consumption’s sake,” thus failing to perceive the Galbraith dependence effect, whereby the conditions under which we consume are structurally determined by the conditions under which we produce.11 Nevertheless, the recognition that capital accumulation or the drive for economic growth is the defining property, not a mere attribute, of the system underlies her entire argument. Recognition of this systemic property led the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter to declare: “Stationary capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.”12

It follows that no mere technological wizardry—of the kind ideologically promoted, for example, by the Breakthrough Institute—will prevent us from breaking the carbon budget within several decades, as long as the driving force of the reigning socioeconomic system is its own self-expansion. Mere improvements in carbon efficiency are too small as long as the scale of production is increasing, which has the effect of expanding the absolute level of carbon dioxide emitted. The inevitable conclusion is that we must rapidly reorganize society on other principles than that of stoking the engine of capital with fossil fuels.

None of this, Klein assures us, is cause for despair. Rather, confronting this harsh reality head on allows us to define the strategic context in which the struggle to prevent climate change must be fought. It is not primarily a technological problem unless one is trying to square the circle: seeking to reconcile expanding capital accumulation with the preservation of the climate. In fact, all sorts of practical solutions to climate change exist at present and are consistent with the enhancement of individual well-being and growth of human community. We can begin immediately to implement the necessary changes such as: democratic planning at all levels of society; introduction of sustainable energy technology; heightened public transportation; reductions in economic and ecological waste; a slowdown in the treadmill of production; redistribution of wealth and power; and above all an emphasis on sustainable human development.13

There are ample historical precedents. We could have a crash program, as in wartime, where populations sacrificed for the common good. In England during the Second World War, Klein observes, driving automobiles virtually ceased. In the United States, the automobile industry was converted in the space of half a year from producing cars to manufacturing trucks, tanks, and planes for the war machine. The necessary rationing—since the price system recognizes nothing but money—can be carried out in an egalitarian manner. Indeed, the purpose of rationing is always to share the sacrifices that have to be made when resources are constrained, and thus it can create a sense of real community, of all being in this together, in responding to a genuine emergency. Although Klein does not refer to it, one of the most inspiring historical examples of this was the slogan “Everyone Eats the Same” introduced in the initial phases of the Cuban Revolution and followed to an extraordinary extent throughout the society. Further, wartime mobilization and rationing are not the only historical examples on which we can draw. The New Deal in the United States, she indicates, focused on public investment and direct promotion of the public good, aimed at the enhancement of use values rather than exchange values.14

Mainstream critics of This Changes Everything often willfully confuse its emphasis on degrowth with the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism. However, Klein’s perspective, as we have seen, could not be more different, since it is about the rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and community. Nevertheless, she could strengthen her case in this respect by drawing on monopoly-capital theory and its critique of the prodigious waste in our economy, whereby only a miniscule proportion of production and human labor is now devoted to actual human needs as opposed to market-generated wants. As the author of No Logo, Klein is well aware of the marketing madness that characterizes the contemporary commodity economy, causing the United States alone to spend more than a trillion dollars a year on the sales effort.15

What is required in a rich country such as the United States at present, as detailed in This Changes Everything, is not an abandonment of all the comforts of civilization but a reversion to the standard of living of the 1970s—two decades into what Galbraith dubbed “the affluent society.” A return to a lower per capita output (in GDP terms) could be made feasible with redistribution of income and wealth, social planning, decreases in working time, and universal satisfaction of genuine human needs (a sustainable environment; clean air and water; ample food, clothing, and shelter; and high-quality health care, education, public transportation, and community-cultural life) such that most people would experience a substantial improvement in their daily lives.16 What Klein envisions here would truly be an ecological-cultural revolution. All that is really required, since the necessary technological means already exist, is people power: the democratic mass mobilization of the population.

Such people power, Klein is convinced, is already emerging in the context of the present planetary emergency. It can be seen in the massive but diffuse social-environmental movement, stretching across the globe, representing the struggles of tens of millions of activists worldwide, to which she gives (or rather takes from the movement itself) the name Blockadia. Numberless individuals are putting themselves on the line, confronting power, and frequently facing arrest, in their opposition to the fossil-fuel industry and capitalism itself. Indigenous peoples are organizing worldwide and taking a leading role in the environmental revolt, as in the Idle No More movement in Canada. Anti-systemic, ecologically motivated struggles are on the rise on every continent.

The primary burden for mitigating climate change necessarily resides with the rich countries, which are historically responsible for the great bulk of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and still emit the most carbon per capita today. The disproportionate responsibility of these nations for climate change is even greater once the final consumption of goods is factored into the accounting. Poor countries are heavily dependent on producing export goods for multinational corporations to be sold to consumers at the center of the world capitalist economy. Hence, the carbon emissions associated with such exports are rightly assigned to the rich nations importing these goods rather than the poor ones exporting them. Moreover, the rich countries have ample resources available to address the problem and carry out the necessary process of social regeneration without seriously compromising the basic welfare of their populations. In these societies, the problem is no longer one of increasing per capita wealth, but rather one of the rational, sustainable, and just organization of society. Klein evokes the spirit of Seattle in 1999 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to argue that sparks igniting radical ecological change exist even in North America, where growing numbers of people are prepared to join a global peoples’ alliance. Essential to the overall struggle, she insists, is the explicit recognition of ecological or climate debt owed by the global North to the global South.17

The left is not spared critical scrutiny in Klein’s work. She acknowledges the existence of a powerful ecological critique within Marxism, and quotes Marx on “capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the natural laws of life itself.‘” Nevertheless, she points to the high carbon emissions of Soviet-type societies, and the heavy dependence of the economies of Bolivia and Venezuela on natural resource extraction, notwithstanding the many social justice initiatives they have introduced. She questions the support given by Greece’s SYRIZA Party to offshore oil exploration in the Aegean. Many of those on the left, and particularly the so-called liberal-left, with their Keynesian predilections, continue to see an expansion of the treadmill of production, even in the rich countries, as the sole means of social advance.18 Klein’s criticisms here are important, but could have benefited, with respect to the periphery, from a consideration of the structure of the imperialist world economy, which is designed specifically to close off options to the poorer countries and force them to meet the needs of the richer ones. This creates a trap that even a Movement Toward Socialism with deep ecological and indigenous values like that of present-day Bolivia cannot seek to overcome without deep contradictions.19

“The unfinished business of liberation,” Klein counsels, requires “a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect.”20 To accomplish this, it is necessary to build the greatest mass movement of humanity for revolutionary change that the world has ever seen: a challenge that is captured in the title to her conclusion: “The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible.” If this seems utopian, her answer would be that the world is heading towards something worse than mere dystopia: unending, cumulative, climate catastrophe, threatening civilization and countless species, including our own.21

Liberal Critics as Gatekeepers

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]onfronted with Klein’s powerful argument in This Changes Everything, liberal pundits have rushed to rein in her arguments so that her ideas are less in conflict with the system. Even where the issue is planetary ecological catastrophe, imperiling hundreds of millions of people, future generations, civilization, and the human species itself, the inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of capitalism is not to be questioned.

As Noam Chomsky explains, liberal opinion plays a vital gatekeeping role for the system, defining itself as the rational left of center, and constituting the outer boundaries of received opinion. Since most of the populace in the United States and the world as a whole is objectively at odds with the regime of capital, it is crucial to the central propaganda function of the media to declare as “off limits” any position that questions the foundations of the system itself. The media effectively says: “Thus far and no further.” To venture farther left beyond the narrow confines of what is permitted within liberal discourse is deemed equivalent to taking “off from the planet.”22

In the case of an influential radical journalist, activist, and best-selling author, like Klein, liberal critics seek first and foremost to refashion her message in ways compatible with the system. They offer her the opportunity to remain within the liberal fraternity—if she will only agree to conform to its rules. The aim is not simply to contain Klein herself but also the movement as a whole that she represents. Thus we find expressions of sympathy for what is presented as her general outlook. Accompanying all such praise, however, is a subtle recasting of her argument in order to blunt its criticism of the system. For example, it is perfectly permissible on liberal grounds to criticize neoliberal disaster capitalism, as an extreme policy regime. This should at no time, however, extend to a blanket critique of capitalism. Liberal discussions of This Changes Everything, insofar as they are positive at all, are careful to interpret it as adhering to the former position.

Yet, the very same seemingly soft-spoken liberal pundits are not above simultaneously brandishing a big stick at the slightest sign of transgression of the Thus Far and No Further principle. If it should turn out that Klein is really serious in arguing that “this changes everything” and actually sees our reality as one of “capitalism vs. the climate,” then, we are told, she has Taken Off From the Planet, and has lost her right to be heard within the mass media or to be considered part of the conversation at all. The aim here is to issue a stern warning—to remind everyone of the rules by which the game is played, and the serious sanctions to be imposed on those not conforming. The penalty for too great a deviation in this respect is excommunication from the mainstream, to be enforced by the corporate media. Noam Chomsky may be the most influential intellectual figure alive in the world today, but he is generally considered beyond the pale and thus persona non grata where the U.S. media is concerned.

None of this of course is new. Invited to speak at University College, Oxford in 1883, with his great friend John Ruskin in the chair, William Morris, Victorian England’s celebrated artist, master-artisan, and epic poet, author of The Earthly Paradise, shocked his audience by publicly declaring himself “one of the people called Socialists.” The guardians of the official order (the Podsnaps of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend) immediately rose up to denounce him—overriding Ruskin’s protests—declaring that if they had known of Morris’s intentions he would not have been given loan of the hall. They gave notice then and there that he was no longer welcome at Oxford or in establishment circles. As historian E.P. Thompson put it, “Morris had crossed the ‘river of fire.’ And the campaign to silence him had begun.”23

The penalty for too great a deviation in this respect is excommunication from the mainstream, to be enforced by the corporate media.

Klein, however, presents a special problem for today’s gatekeepers. Her opposition to the logic of capital in This Changes Everything is not couched primarily in the traditional terms of the left, concerned mainly with issues of exploitation. Rather, she makes it clear that what has finally induced her to cross the river of fire is an impending threat to the survival of civilization and humanity itself. She calls for a broad revolt of humanity against capitalism and for the creation of a more sustainable society in response to the epochal challenge of our time. This is an altogether different kind of animal—one that liberals cannot dismiss out of hand without seeming to go against the scientific consensus and concern for humanity as a whole.

Further complicating matters, Klein upsets the existing order of things in her book by declaring “the right is right.” By this she means that the political right’s position on climate change is largely motivated by what it correctly sees as an Either/Or question of capitalism vs. the climate. Hence, conservatives seek to deny climate change—even rejecting the science—in their determination to defend capitalism. In contrast, liberal ideologues—caught in the selfsame trap of capitalism vs. the climate—tend to waffle, accepting most of the science, while turning around and contradicting themselves by downplaying the logical implications for society. They pretend that there are easy, virtually painless, non-disruptive ways out of this trap via still undeveloped technology, market magic, and mild government regulation—presumably allowing climate change to be mitigated without seriously affecting the capitalist economy. Rather than accepting the Either/Or of capitalism against the climate, liberals convert the problem into one of neoliberalism vs. the climate, insisting that greater regulation, including such measures as carbon trading and carbon offsets, constitutes the solution, with no need to address the fundamental logic of the economic and social system.

Ultimately, it is this liberal form of denialism that is the more dangerous since it denies the social dimension of the problem and blocks the necessary social solutions. Hence, it is the liberal view that is the main target of Klein’s book. In a wider sense, though, conservatives and liberals can be seen as mutually taking part in a dance in which they join hands to block any solution that requires going against the system. The conservative Tweedle Dums dance to the tune that the cost of addressing climate change is too high and threatens the capitalist system. Hence, the science that points to the problem must be denied. The liberal Tweedle Dees dance to the tune that the science is correct, but that the whole problem can readily be solved with a few virtually costless tweaks here and there, put into place by a new regulatory regime. Hence, the system itself is never an issue.

It is her constant exposure of this establishment farce that makes Klein’s criticism so dangerous. She demands that the gates be flung open and the room for democratic political and social maneuver be expanded enormously. What is needed, for starters, is a pro-democracy movement not simply in the periphery of the capitalist world but at the center of the system itself, where the global plutocracy has its main headquarters.

The task from a ruling-class governing perspective, then, is to find a way to contain or neutralize Klein’s views and those of the entire radical climate movement. The ideas she represents are to be included in the corporate media conversation only under extreme sufferance, and then only insofar as they can be corralled and rebranded to fit within a generally liberal, reformist perspective: one that does not threaten the class-based system of capital accumulation.

Rob Nixon can be credited with laying out the general liberal strategy in this respect in a review of Klein’s book in the New York Times. He declares outright that Klein has written “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since ‘Silent Spring.‘” He strongly applauds her for her criticisms of climate change deniers, and for revealing how industry has corrupted the political process, delaying climate action. All of this, however, is preliminary to his attempt to rein in her argument. There is a serious flaw in her book, we are told, evident in her subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate. “What’s with the subtitle?” he scornfully asks. Then stepping in as Klein’s friend and protector, Nixon tells New York Times readers that the subtitle is simply a mistake, to be ignored. We should not be thrown off, he proclaims, by a “subtitle” that “sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight.” Rather, “Klein’s adversary is neoliberalism—the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of extreme extraction.” In this subtle recasting of her argument, Klein reemerges as a mere critic of capitalist excess, rejecting specific attributes taken on by the system in its neoliberal phase that can be easily discarded, and that do not touch the system’s fundamental properties. Her goal, we are told, is the same as in The Shock Doctrine: turning back the neoliberal “counterrevolution,” returning us to a more humane Golden Age liberal order. Her subtitle can therefore be dismissed in its entirety, as it “belies the sophistication” of her work: code for her supposed conformity to the Thus Far and No Further principle. Employing ridicule as a gatekeeping device—with the implication that this is the sorry fate that awaits anyone who transgresses Thus Far and No Further—Nixon states that “Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow.”24

Dave Pruett in The Huffington Post quickly falls into step, showing how well he comprehends the general strategy already outlined by Nixon in the New York Times. At the same time, he indicates his readiness to pull in the reins a bit more. Thus we find again that Klein’s book is a “masterpiece,” to be put on the same shelf as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And once again we learn that her subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate is a “misnomer.” Resorting to a classic Cold War ploy, Pruett further insinuates that the subtitle gives “critics room to accuse Klein of advocating for some discredited Soviet-style state-regulated economy.” Of course such critics, he turns around and says, would surely be wrong. Klein’s argument in This Changes Everything is really nothing more than a criticism of “unbridled capitalism—that is, neoliberalism.” Moreover, the “true culprit” of her argument is even more specific than this: “extractivism,” or the extreme exploitation of non-renewable natural resources. Still, Pruett, through his classic Cold War ploy, has with consummate skill planted in advance a lingering doubt and a warning in the mind of the reader, along with an implicit threat directed at Klein herself. If it should turn out that Klein is serious about her subtitle, and she is actually talking about “capitalism vs. the climate,” then she is discredited in advance by the fate of the Soviet Union, with which she is then to be associated.25

Approaching This Changes Everything much more bluntly, Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for the New York Review of Books, quickly lets us know that she has not come to praise Klein but to bury her. Klein’s references to conservation, “managed degrowth,” and the need to shrink humanity’s ecological footprint, Kolbert says, are all non-marketable ideas, to be condemned on straightforwardly capitalist-consumerist principles. Such strategies and actions will not sell to today’s consumers, even if the future of coming generations is in jeopardy. Nothing will get people to give up “HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car.” Unless it is demonstrated how acting on climate change will result in a “minimal disruption to ‘the American way of life,‘” she asserts, nothing said with respect to climate change action matters at all. Klein has simply provided a convenient “fable” of little real value. This Changes Everything is indicted for having violated accepted commercial axioms in its core thesis, which Kolbert converts into an argument for extreme austerity. Klein is to be faulted for her grandiose schemes that do not fit into U.S. consumer society, and for not “looking at all closely at what this [reduction in the commodity economy] would entail.” Klein has failed to specify exactly how many watts of electricity per capita will be consumed under her plan. It is much easier, Kolbert seems to say, for U.S. consumers to imagine the end of a climate permitting human survival than to envision the end of two-million-square-foot shopping malls.26

David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times unveils still another weapon in the liberal arsenal, denouncing Klein for her optimism and her faith in humanity. “There is, in places,” he emphasizes, “a disconnect between her [Klein’s] idealism and her realism, what she thinks ought to happen and what she recognizes likely will.” Social analysis, in Ulin’s view, seems to be reduced to forecasting the most likely outcomes. Klein apparently failed to consult with Las Vegas oddsmakers before making her case for saving humanity. Klein’s penchant for idealism, he declares, “is most glaring in her suggestions for large-scale policy mitigation, which can seem simplistic, relying on notions of fairness…that corporate culture does not share.” Regrettably, Ulin does not tell us exactly where the kind of climate justice programs put in place by Exxon and Walmart’s “corporate culture” will actually lead us in the end. However, he does give us a specious clue in his final paragraph, describing what he apparently considers to be the most realistic scenario. The planet, we are informed, “has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.” The earth will go on without us.27

Other liberal gatekeepers pull out all the stops, attacking not just every radical notion in Klein’s book but the book as a whole, and even Klein herself. Writing for the influential liberal news and opinion website, the Daily Beast, Michael Signer characterizes Klein’s book as “a curiously clueless manifesto.” It will not spark a movement against carbon, in part because Klein “rejects capitalism, market mechanisms, and even, seemingly, profit motives and corporate governance.” She offers “a compelling story,” but one that “creates the paradoxical effect of making this perspicacious and successful author seem like an idiot.” Signer depicts her as if she has Taken Off From the Planet simply by refusing to stay within the narrow spectrum of opinion defined by the Wall Street Journal on the one side and the New York Times on the other. “For anyone who believes in capitalism and political leadership,” we are informed, “her book won’t change anything at all.”28

Mark Jaccard, an orthodox economist writing for the Literary Review of Canada, declares that This Changes Everything ignores how market-based mechanisms are a powerful means for reducing carbon emissions. However, his main evidence for this contention is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of a climate bill in California in 2006, which is supposed to reduce the state’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Unfortunately for Jaccard’s claim, a little over a week before he criticized Klein on the basis of the California experiment, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that California’s emissions reduction initiative was in some respects a “shell game,” as California was reducing emissions on paper while emissions were growing in surrounding states from which California was also increasingly purchasing power.29 Add to this the facts that California’s initiative is more state-based than capital-based, and that the real problem is not one of getting down to 1990 level emissions, but getting down to pre-1760 level emissions, i.e., carbon emissions eventually have to fall to zero—and not just in California but worldwide.

Jaccard goes on to accuse Klein of wearing “‘blame capitalism’ blinders” that keep her from seeing the actual difficulties that make dealing with climate so imposing. This includes her failure to perceive the “Faustian dilemma” associated with fossil fuels, given that they have yielded so many benefits for humanity and can offer many more to the poor of the world. “This dilemma,” which he is so proud to have discovered, “is not the fault of capitalism.” Indeed, capitalist economics, we are told, is already well equipped to solve the climate problem and only misguided state policies stand in the way. Drawing upon an argument presented by Paul Krugman in his New York Times column, Jaccard suggests that “greenhouse gas reductions have proven to be not nearly as costly as science deniers on the right and anti-growth activists on the left would have us believe.” Krugman, a Tweedle Dee, rejects the carefree Tweedle Dum melody whereby climate change, as a threat to the system, is simply wished away along with the science. He counters this simple, carefree tune with what he regards as a more complex, harmonious song in which the problem is whisked away in spite of the science by means of a few virtually costless market regulations. So convinced is Jaccard himself of capitalism’s basic harmonious relation to the climate that he simply turns a deaf ear to Klein’s impressive account of the vast system-scale changes required to stop climate change.30

Will Boisvert, commenting on behalf of the self-described “post-environmentalist” Breakthrough Institute, condemns Klein and the entire environmental movement in an article pointedly entitled, “The Left vs. the Climate: Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein’s Pastoral Fantasy—and Embrace Our High Energy Planet.” Apparently it is not industry that is destroying a livable climate through its carbon dioxide emissions, but rather environmentalists, by refusing to adopt the Breakthrough Institute’s technological crusade for surmounting nature’s limits on a planetary scale. As Breakthrough senior fellow Bruno Latour writes in an article for the Institute, it is necessary “to love your monsters,” meaning the kind of Frankenstein creations envisioned in Mary Shelley’s novel. Humanity should be prepared to put its full trust, the Breakthrough Institute tells us, in such wondrous technological answers as nuclear power, “clean coal,” geoengineering, and fracking. For its skepticism regarding such technologies, the whole left (and much of the scientific community) is branded as a bunch of Luddites. As Boisvert exclaims in terms designed to delight the entire corporate sector:

To make a useful contribution to changing everything, the Left could begin by changing itself. It could start by redoing its risk assessments and rethinking its phobic hostility to nuclear power. It could abandon the infatuation with populist insurrection and advance a serious politics of systematic state action. It could stop glamorizing austerity under the guise of spiritual authenticity and put development prominently on its environmental agenda. It could accept that industry and technology do indeed distance us from nature—and in doing so can protect nature from human extractions. And it could realize that, as obnoxious as capitalism can be, scapegoating it won’t spare us the hard thinking and hard trade-offs that a sustainable future requires.31

Boisvert here echoes Erle Ellis, who, in an earlier essay for the Breakthrough Institute, contended that climate change is not a catastrophic threat, because “human systems are prepared to adapt to and prosper in the hotter, less biodiverse planet that we are busily creating.” On this basis, Boisvert chastises Klein and all who think like her for refusing to celebrate capitalism’s creative destruction of everything in existence.32

Klein of course is not caught completely unaware by such attacks. For those imbued in the values of the current system, she writes in her book, “changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.”33 Indeed, all of the mainstream challenges to This Changes Everything discussed above have one thing in common: they insist that capitalism is the “end of history,” and that the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and the threat that this represents to life as we know it change nothing about today’s Panglossian best of all possible worlds.

The Ultimate Line of Defense

Naturally, it is not simply liberals, but also socialists, in some cases, who have attacked This Changes Everything. Socialist critics, though far more sympathetic with her analysis, are inclined to fault her book for not being explicit enough about the nature of system change, the full scale of the transformations required, and the need for socialism.34 Klein says little about the vital question of the working class, without which the revolutionary changes she envisions are impossible. It is therefore necessary to ask: To what extent is the ultimate goal to build a new movement toward socialism, a society to be controlled by the associated producers? Such questions still remain unanswered by the left climate movement and by Klein herself.

In our view, though, it is difficult to fault Klein for her silences in this respect. Her aim at present is clearly confined to the urgent and strategic—if more limited—one of making the broad case for System Change Not Climate Change. Millions of people, she believes, are crossing or are on the brink of crossing the river of fire. Capitalism, they charge, is now obsolete, since it is no longer compatible either with our survival as a species or our welfare as individual human beings. Hence, we need to build society anew in our time with all the human creativity and collective imagination at our disposal. It is this burgeoning global movement that is now demanding anti-capitalist and post-capitalist solutions. Klein sees herself merely as the people’s megaphone in this respect. The goal, she explains, is a complex social one of fusing all of the many anti-systemic movements of the left. The struggle to save a habitable earth is humanity’s ultimate line of defense—but one that at the same time requires that we take the offensive, finding ways to move forward collectively, extending the boundaries of liberated space. David Harvey usefully describes this fusion of movements as a co-revolutionary strategy.35

Is the vision presented in This Changes Everything compatible with a classical socialist position? Given the deep ecological commitments displayed by Marx, Engels, and Morris, there is little room for doubt—which is not to deny that socialists need to engage in self-criticism, given past failures to implement ecological values and the new challenges that characterize our epoch. Yet, the whole question strikes us in a way as a bit odd, since historical materialism does not represent a rigid, set position, but is rather the ongoing struggle for a world of substantive equality and sustainable human development. As Morris wrote in A Dream of John Ball:

But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name—while I pondered all this, John Ball began to speak again in the same soft and clear voice with which he had left off.

In this “soft and clear voice,” Ball, a leader in the fourteenth-century English Peasant’s Revolt, proceeded, in Morris’s retelling, to declare that the one true end was “Fellowship on earth”—an end that was also the movement of the people and could never be stopped.36

Klein offers us anew this same vision of human community borne of an epoch of revolutionary change. “There is little doubt,” she declares in her own clear voice, that another crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and confidence with which it will be seized. Because these moments when the impossible seems suddenly possible are excruciatingly rare and precious. That means more must be made of them. The next time one arises, it must be harnessed not only to denounce the world as it is, and build fleeting pockets of liberated space. It must be the catalyst to actually build the world that will keep us all safe. The stakes are simply too high, and time too short, to settle for anything less.37

The ultimate goal of course is not simply “to build the world that will keep us all safe” but to build a world of genuine equality and human community—the only conceivable basis for sustainable human development. Equality, Simón Bolívar exclaimed, is “the law of laws.”38

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

[box type=”bio”] John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah and co-author of The Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).[/box]

Notes

↩Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), “‘A Feeling It’s Gonna Be Huge: Naomi Klein on People’s Climate Eve” (interview), Common Dreams, September 21, 2014, http://commondreams.org.
↩On this, see Adam Morris, “The ‘System Change’ Doctrine,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 21, 2014, http://lareviewofbooks.org; System Change Not Climate Change, http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org; Klein, This Changes Everything, 87–89.
↩William Morris, Collected Works (London: Longmans Green, 1914), vol. 22, 131–32; E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 244; Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), The Shock Doctrine (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 342, 444–47.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 55.
↩Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, http://ipcc.ch; trillionthtonne.org, accessed January 3, 2015; “Carbon Budget Message of IPCC Report Reveals Daunting Challenge,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2013, http://huffingtonpost.com; Myles Allen, et. al., “The Exit Strategy,” Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, http://nature.com, 56–58. It should be noted that the trillionth metric ton calculation is based on carbon, not carbon dioxide. Moreover, the 2039 estimate of the point at which the trillion metric ton will be reached, made by trillionthtonne.org (sponsored by scientists at Oxford University), should be regarded as quite optimistic under present, business-as-usual conditions, since less than three years ago, at the end of 2012, it was estimated that the trillion ton would be reached in 2043, or in thirty-one years. (See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7 [December 2012]: 2.) The gap, according to these estimates, is thus closing faster as time passes and nothing is done to reduce emissions.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 13, 21, 56, 87; Kevin Anderson, “Why Carbon Prices Can’t Deliver the 2° Target,” August 15, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 19, 56. The fact that neoliberal globalization and the creation of the WTO had permanently derailed the movement associated with the Earth Summit in Rio in 1993, including the attempt to prevent climate change, was stressed by one of us more than a dozen years ago at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002, when Klein was present. See John Bellamy Foster, “A Planetary Defeat: The Failure of Global Environmental Reform,” Monthly Review 54, no. 8 (January 2003): 1–9, originally based on several talks delivered in Johannesburg, August 2002.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 21–24.
↩Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 349.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 179; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1984), 121–28. As the author of No Logo, Klein is of course aware of the contradictions of consumption under capitalist commodity production.
↩Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1951), 293.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 57–58, 115, 479–80.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 10, 16–17, 115–16, 454; Adolfo Gilly, “Inside the Cuban Revolution,” Monthly Review 16, no. 6 (October 1964): 69; John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 13.
↩“U,.S. Marketing Spending Exceeded $1 Trillion in 2005,” Metrics Business and Marketing Intelligence, June 26, 2006, http://metrics2.com; Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 91–94.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 381–82, 408–13.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 176–87; “‘A Feeling It’s Gonna Be Huge.’”
↩For historical materialist analyses of the extractivism problem in Bolivia and the difficult problem of overcoming it see Álvaro García Linera, Geopolitics of the Amazon, 2012, http://climateandcapitalism.com; Frederico Fuentes, “The Dangerous Myths of ‘Anti-Extractivism’,” May 19, 2014, http://climateandcapitalism.com. As the author of The Shock Doctrine, Klein is cognizant of imperialism but it does not enter in her analysis much here, partly because she is making a point of being balanced by criticizing the left as well as the right.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 458–60.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 43, 58–63.
↩Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (New York: Black Rose Books, 1994), 58. On the “off limits” notion see Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism: The Absurd System,” Monthly Review 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 2.
↩Thompson, William Morris, 270–71; Morris, Collected Works, vol. 23, 172.
↩Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything,’” New York Times, November 6, 2014, http://nytimes.com.
↩Dave Pruett, “A Line in the Tar Sands: Naomi Klein on the Climate,” Huffington Post, November 26, 2014, http://huffingtonpost.com.
↩Elizabeth Kolbert, “Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014, http://nybooks.com; Naomi Klein and Elizabeth Kolbert, “Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015, http:// nybooks.com.
↩David L. Ulin, “In ‘This Changes Everything,’ Naomi Klein Sounds Climate Alarm,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2014, http://touch.latimes.com.
↩Michael Signer, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Will Change Nothing,” Daily Beast, November 17, 2014, http://thedailybeast.com.
↩Mark Jaccard, “I Wish This Changed Everything,” Literary Review of Canada, November 2014, http://reviewcanada.ca; “Despite California Climate Law, Carbon Emissions May be a Shell Game,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2014, http://latimes.com.
↩Mark Jaccard, “I Wish This Changed Everything”; Paul Krugman, “Errors and Emissions,” New York Times, September 8, 2014, http://nytimes.com.
↩Will Boisvert, “The Left vs. the Climate: Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein’s Pastoral Fantasy—and Embrace Our High-Energy Planet,” The Breakthrough, September 18, 2014, http://thebreakthrough.org; Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters,” The Breakthrough no. 2, Fall 2011, http://thebreakthrough. Klein herself situates the Breakthrough Institute within her criticism of the right, questioning its claim to progressive values. Klein, This Changes Everything, 57.
↩Erle Ellis, “The Planet of No Return,” The Breakthrough no. 2, Fall 2011, http://thebreakthrough.org; Boisvert, “The Left vs. the Climate.”
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 89.
↩See the important analysis in Richard Smith, “Climate Crisis, the Deindustrialization Imperative and the Jobs vs. Environment Dilemma,” Truthout, November 12, 2014, http://truth-out.org.
↩David Harvey, The Engima of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–35.
↩William Morris, Three Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986).
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 466.
↩Símon Bólivar, “Message to the Congress of Bolivia, May 25, 1826,” Selected Works, vol. 2 (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), 603.

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The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything

MONTHLY REVIEW

Crossing the River of Fire

Klein with documentarian Brian Long. (Via @mjb.flickr)

by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

The front cover of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, is designed to look like a protest sign. It consists of the title alone in big block letters, with the emphasis on Changes. Both the author’s name and the subtitle are absent. It is only when we look at the spine of the book, turn it over, or open it to the title page that we see it is written by North America’s leading left climate intellectual-activist and that the subtitle is Capitalism vs. the Climate.1 All of which is clearly meant to convey in no uncertain terms that climate change literally changes everything for today’s society. It threatens to turn the mythical human conquest of nature on its head, endangering present-day civilization and throwing doubt on the long-term survival of Homo sapiens.

The Global Climateric

we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slightly ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things that we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die….

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….

Because of our lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.9

Mainstream critics of This Changes Everything often willfully confuse its emphasis on degrowth with the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism. However, Klein’s perspective, as we have seen, could not be more different, since it is about the rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and community. Nevertheless, she could strengthen her case in this respect by drawing on monopoly-capital theory and its critique of the prodigious waste in our economy, whereby only a miniscule proportion of production and human labor is now devoted to actual human needs as opposed to market-generated wants. As the author of No Logo, Klein is well aware of the marketing madness that characterizes the contemporary commodity economy, causing the United States alone to spend more than a trillion dollars a year on the sales effort.15

The primary burden for mitigating climate change necessarily resides with the rich countries, which are historically responsible for the great bulk of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and still emit the most carbon per capita today. The disproportionate responsibility of these nations for climate change is even greater once the final consumption of goods is factored into the accounting. Poor countries are heavily dependent on producing export goods for multinational corporations to be sold to consumers at the center of the world capitalist economy. Hence, the carbon emissions associated with such exports are rightly assigned to the rich nations importing these goods rather than the poor ones exporting them. Moreover, the rich countries have ample resources available to address the problem and carry out the necessary process of social regeneration without seriously compromising the basic welfare of their populations. In these societies, the problem is no longer one of increasing per capita wealth, but rather one of the rational, sustainable, and just organization of society. Klein evokes the spirit of Seattle in 1999 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to argue that sparks igniting radical ecological change exist even in North America, where growing numbers of people are prepared to join a global peoples’ alliance. Essential to the overall struggle, she insists, is the explicit recognition of ecological or climate debt owed by the global North to the global South.17

Liberal Critics as Gatekeepers

Confronted with Klein’s powerful argument in This Changes Everything, liberal pundits have rushed to rein in her arguments so that her ideas are less in conflict with the system. Even where the issue is planetary ecological catastrophe, imperiling hundreds of millions of people, future generations, civilization, and the human species itself, the inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of capitalism is not to be questioned.

As Noam Chomsky explains, liberal opinion plays a vital gatekeeping role for the system, defining itself as the rational left of center, and constituting the outer boundaries of received opinion. Since most of the populace in the United States and the world as a whole is objectively at odds with the regime of capital, it is crucial to the central propaganda function of the media to declare as “off limits” any position that questions the foundations of the system itself. The media effectively says: “Thus far and no further.” To venture farther left beyond the narrow confines of what is permitted within liberal discourse is deemed equivalent to taking “off from the planet.”22

“The task from a ruling-class governing perspective is to find a way to contain or neutralize Klein’s views and those of the entire radical climate movement…”

Rob Nixon. (University of Wisconsin)

Rob Nixon can be credited with laying out the general liberal strategy in this respect in a review of Klein’s book in the New York Times. He declares outright that Klein has written “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since ‘Silent Spring.‘” He strongly applauds her for her criticisms of climate change deniers, and for revealing how industry has corrupted the political process, delaying climate action. All of this, however, is preliminary to his attempt to rein in her argument. There is a serious flaw in her book, we are told, evident in her subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate. “What’s with the subtitle?” he scornfully asks. Then stepping in as Klein’s friend and protector, Nixon tells New York Times readers that the subtitle is simply a mistake, to be ignored. We should not be thrown off, he proclaims, by a “subtitle” that “sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight.” Rather, “Klein’s adversary is neoliberalism—the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of extreme extraction.” In this subtle recasting of her argument, Klein reemerges as a mere critic of capitalist excess, rejecting specific attributes taken on by the system in its neoliberal phase that can be easily discarded, and that do not touch the system’s fundamental properties. Her goal, we are told, is the same as in The Shock Doctrine: turning back the neoliberal “counterrevolution,” returning us to a more humane Golden Age liberal order. Her subtitle can therefore be dismissed in its entirety, as it “belies the sophistication” of her work: code for her supposed conformity to the Thus Far and No Further principle. Employing ridicule as a gatekeeping device—with the implication that this is the sorry fate that awaits anyone who transgresses Thus Far and No Further—Nixon states that “Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow.”24

Approaching This Changes Everything much more bluntly, Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for the New York Review of Books, quickly lets us know that she has not come to praise Klein but to bury her. Klein’s references to conservation, “managed degrowth,” and the need to shrink humanity’s ecological footprint, Kolbert says, are all non-marketable ideas, to be condemned on straightforwardly capitalist-consumerist principles. Such strategies and actions will not sell to today’s consumers, even if the future of coming generations is in jeopardy. Nothing will get people to give up “HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car.” Unless it is demonstrated how acting on climate change will result in a “minimal disruption to ‘the American way of life,‘”she asserts, nothing said with respect to climate change action matters at all. Klein has simply provided a convenient “fable” of little real value. This Changes Everything is indicted for having violated accepted commercial axioms in its core thesis, which Kolbert converts into an argument for extreme austerity. Klein is to be faulted for her grandiose schemes that do not fit into U.S. consumer society, and for not “looking at all closely at what this [reduction in the commodity economy] would entail.” Klein has failed to specify exactly how many watts of electricity per capita will be consumed under her plan. It is much easier, Kolbert seems to say, for U.S. consumers to imagine the end of a climate permitting human survival than to envision the end of two-million-square-foot shopping malls.26

David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times unveils still another weapon in the liberal arsenal, denouncing Klein for her optimism and her faith in humanity. “There is, in places,” he emphasizes, “a disconnect between her [Klein’s] idealism and her realism, what she thinks ought to happen and what she recognizes likely will.” Social analysis, in Ulin’s view, seems to be reduced to forecasting the most likely outcomes. Klein apparently failed to consult with Las Vegas oddsmakers before making her case for saving humanity. Klein’s penchant for idealism, he declares, “is most glaring in her suggestions for large-scale policy mitigation, which can seem simplistic, relying on notions of fairness…that corporate culture does not share.” Regrettably, Ulin does not tell us exactly where the kind of climate justice programs put in place by Exxon and Walmart’s “corporate culture” will actually lead us in the end. However, he does give us a specious clue in his final paragraph, describing what he apparently considers to be the most realistic scenario. The planet, we are informed, “has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.” The earth will go on without us.27

Mike Signer (New Dominion Project)

Other liberal gatekeepers pull out all the stops, attacking not just every radical notion in Klein’s book but the book as a whole, and even Klein herself. Writing for the influential liberal news and opinion website, the Daily Beast, Michael Signer characterizes Klein’s book as “a curiously clueless manifesto.” It will not spark a movement against carbon, in part because Klein “rejects capitalism, market mechanisms, and even, seemingly, profit motives and corporate governance.” She offers “a compelling story,” but one that “creates the paradoxical effect of making this perspicacious and successful author seem like an idiot.” Signer depicts her as if she has Taken Off From the Planet simply by refusing to stay within the narrow spectrum of opinion defined by the Wall Street Journal on the one side and the New York Times on the other. “For anyone who believes in capitalism and political leadership,” we are informed, “her book won’t change anything at all.”28

Mark Jaccard, an orthodox economist writing for the Literary Review of Canada, declares that This Changes Everything ignores how market-based mechanisms are a powerful means for reducing carbon emissions. However, his main evidence for this contention is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of a climate bill in California in 2006, which is supposed to reduce the state’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Unfortunately for Jaccard’s claim, a little over a week before he criticized Klein on the basis of the California experiment, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that California’s emissions reduction initiative was in some respects a “shell game,” as California was reducing emissions on paper while emissions were growing in surrounding states from which California was also increasingly purchasing power.29Add to this the facts that California’s initiative is more state-based than capital-based, and that the real problem is not one of getting down to 1990 level emissions, but getting down to pre-1760 level emissions, i.e., carbon emissions eventually have to fall to zero—and not just in California but worldwide.

The Ultimate Line of Defense

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah and co-author of The Tragedy of the Commodity(Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).

Notes

↩Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), “‘A Feeling It’s Gonna Be Huge: Naomi Klein on People’s Climate Eve” (interview), Common Dreams, September 21, 2014, http://commondreams.org.
System Change Not Climate Change, http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org; Klein, This Changes Everything, 87–89.
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 244; Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), The Shock Doctrine (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 342, 444–47.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 55.
Huffington Post, October 4, 2013, http://huffingtonpost.com; Myles Allen, et. al., “The Exit Strategy,” Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, http://nature.com, 56–58. It should be noted that the trillionth metric ton calculation is based on carbon, not carbon dioxide. Moreover, the 2039 estimate of the point at which the trillion metric ton will be reached, made by trillionthtonne.org (sponsored by scientists at Oxford University), should be regarded as quite optimistic under present, business-as-usual conditions, since less than three years ago, at the end of 2012, it was estimated that the trillion ton would be reached in 2043, or in thirty-one years. (See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7 [December 2012]: 2.) The gap, according to these estimates, is thus closing faster as time passes and nothing is done to reduce emissions.
http://kevinanderson.info.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 19, 56. The fact that neoliberal globalization and the creation of the WTO had permanently derailed the movement associated with the Earth Summit in Rio in 1993, including the attempt to prevent climate change, was stressed by one of us more than a dozen years ago at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002, when Klein was present. See John Bellamy Foster, “A Planetary Defeat: The Failure of Global Environmental Reform,” Monthly Review 54, no. 8 (January 2003): 1–9, originally based on several talks delivered in Johannesburg, August 2002.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 21–24.
↩Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 349.
The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1984), 121–28. As the author of No Logo, Klein is of course aware of the contradictions of consumption under capitalist commodity production.
↩Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1951), 293.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 57–58, 115, 479–80.
Monthly Review 16, no. 6 (October 1964): 69; John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 13.
The Consumer Trap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 91–94.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 381–82, 408–13.
The Dangerous Myths of ‘Anti-Extractivism’,” May 19, 2014, http://climateandcapitalism.com. As the author of The Shock Doctrine, Klein is cognizant of imperialism but it does not enter in her analysis much here, partly because she is making a point of being balanced by criticizing the left as well as the right.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 458–60.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 43, 58–63.
↩Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (New York: Black Rose Books, 1994), 58. On the “off limits” notion see Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism: The Absurd System,” Monthly Review 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 2.
Collected Works, vol. 23, 172.
↩Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything,’” New York Times, November 6, 2014, http://nytimes.com.
↩Dave Pruett, “A Line in the Tar Sands: Naomi Klein on the Climate,” Huffington Post, November 26, 2014, http://huffingtonpost.com.
Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015, http:// nybooks.com.
↩David L. Ulin, “In ‘This Changes Everything,’ Naomi Klein Sounds Climate Alarm,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2014, http://touch.latimes.com.
↩Michael Signer, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Will Change Nothing,” Daily Beast, November 17, 2014, http://thedailybeast.com.
Despite California Climate Law, Carbon Emissions May be a Shell Game,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2014, http://latimes.com.
Errors and Emissions,” New York Times, September 8, 2014, http://nytimes.com.
Love Your Monsters,” The Breakthrough no. 2, Fall 2011, http://thebreakthrough. Klein herself situates the Breakthrough Institute within her criticism of the right, questioning its claim to progressive values. Klein, This Changes Everything, 57.
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 89.
↩See the important analysis in Richard Smith, “Climate Crisis, the Deindustrialization Imperative and the Jobs vs. Environment Dilemma,” Truthout, November 12, 2014, http://truth-out.org.
↩David Harvey, The Engima of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–35.
↩William Morris, Three Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986).
↩Klein, This Changes Everything, 466.
↩Símon Bólivar, “Message to the Congress of Bolivia, May 25, 1826,” Selected Works, vol. 2 (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), 603.

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