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Society, Nature, Consumption

Stark warnings of the unprecedented horrors that will ensue if the world continues to heat at current rates are now being issued on an almost daily basis by researchers and those reporting their findings. Some of the more recent alarms have been sounded in the best-selling The Uninhabitable World, in which David Wallace-Wells catalogues the fires and floods, famines and plagues, ozone smogs and marine deaths that will afflict us, bringing social chaos and economic breakdown in their wake. Even at a warming of 2° Celsius (a best case scenario), he tells us,

The ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unliveable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer …. At three degrees, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last nineteen months and in the Caribbean twenty-one months longer. In northern Africa, the figure is sixty months longer – five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple, or more, in the United States. At four degrees, there would be eight million more cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone …. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion – more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today.¹

The perils of global warming are, understandably, an overwhelmingly dominant concern of the now voluminous body of writings devoted to the natural environment and human relations with it. But there has also been significant growth in the less apocalyptic style of writing on nature: that which celebrates the beauty and importance of the countryside and wild nature, and calls upon us to recognise and re-establish our affinities with other animals. Both kinds of literature continue to offer essential and variously alarming and moving testimonies; and both have brought about a significant shift in public awareness of the issues and helped establish the environment as an unavoidable reference point for government and policy making. Yet both types of writing tend to hold back from any serious and sustained targeting of the everyday consumption practices that are mainly responsible for environmental crisis.² The more alarmist literature often assumes that current consumption and lifestyles will continue unchecked, or if and when they have to be checked, it will be undesirable and to our detriment. Wallace-Wells, for example, speaks of us having, at best, to live in a world ‘degraded by our own hands, and with the horizon of human possibility dramatically dimmed’.³ For this way of thinking, technology in the form of artificial geoengineering, carbon capture and revolutionary ways of providing for emission-free energy offer the only realistic route to avoiding calamity – and even if they secure our ongoing survival, life will have lost much of its delight.⁴ Advocates of more natural geoengineering schemes such as the ‘half-earth’ rewilding project put forward by E.O. Wilson or the ‘Two-Thousand Watt Society’ proposed by the Zürich Federal Institute of Technology both advise us of the austerity and sacrifice such projects would entail rather than noting any potential they may have to open the way to a more pleasurable way of living.⁵ In other cases, when direct guidance is given on consumption, it tends to be either too general (‘use energy more efficiently’, ‘reduce food waste’) or too limited in its reach (‘recycle’, ‘cut out plastic straws’). Nor is much proffered in the way of alternatives to affluent consumerist understandings of human need and pleasure. Recalling us to the beauty and value of nature can encourage greater appreciation of flora and fauna, pastoral landscape, wetlands and wilderness, but such appreciation is consistent with people continuing to consume in ways that threaten the natural environment and undermine its support systems. Think of the flight patterns of the eco-tourists, the globe-trotting of eco-critics moving from conference to conference, or simply the amount of car-driving that goes on to beauty spots and nature reserves. There is also a risk that the insistent attention to global warming and looming environmental disaster (whose concomitant institutional meetings, polar surveys of damage, academic seminars and the like also involve lots of flying around) encourages ecological despair rather than firing us to action. At any rate, my view – which underpins the general orientation of this book – is that green thought and writing, hitherto overly centred on the depletion of the natural world, now needs to focus less on the destruction of nature and its impact on a – supposedly unreformable – consumerist way of living, and more on human political culture and its reconstruction. The critical gaze should be centred on the activities of human beings in affluent societies, both as producers and as consumers; and it needs, too, to develop a more seductive vision of the very different forms of consumption and collective life we will need to adopt if we are serious about ecological sustainability. The main aim must be to challenge the supposedly natural (in the sense of inevitable and non-political) evolution of both the capitalist growth economy and the consumer culture it has created, to undermine the sense that this development has been essential to human well-being, and to argue that we will prosper better without it.

De-naturalising capitalism

Thinkers such as Andreas Malm, Alf Hornborg and Jason Moore, have helped in this task of late by re-directing our attention to industrial history, and especially to the exceptional features of capitalism as a mode of production and their precipitating role in anthropogenic global warming.⁶ In doing so they have, from differing perspectives and with differing emphases, renewed one of the most important themes of Marx’s own argument on capitalism, namely, his insistence on its specificity. All forms of production, Marx argues, involve interaction between humanity and nature, and in this sense all epochs of production have certain common traits. Yet, ‘just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such’. Capital (investment in labour-power for the realisation of profit) can be viewed as a ‘general, eternal relation of nature’ only if we ‘leave out just the specific quality’ which alone makes ‘instrument of production’ and ‘stored up labour’ into capital.⁷ Yet a century and a half on from this, the naturalisation of the capitalist economy is as strongly embedded in current discourse as it ever was – perhaps even more strongly now that, after the demise of Soviet communism, the adherents of neo-liberalism feel free to present globalised capitalism as the only game in town, the option that human nature is hard-wired to choose (a position made easier to project thanks to the widespread misapplication of neuroscience in accounts of human behaviour).⁸

Neo-liberalism’s apologists project the productivist dynamic associated with capitalist accumulation – the outcome of a specific history – onto human productive activity in general. However, as Marx saw, the production of material wealth need not and should not be seen as the main purpose of life. As Luis Andueza writes,

The fact that within capitalism people and their social relations are rendered means for the production of objects is precisely what Marx considers perverse about the whole system, and the way in which these social relations come to be obfuscated and severed by the commodity-form is at the core of his critique of fetishism. The apparent autonomy and primacy of economic forms over their dynamic human content is what constitutes the topsy-turvyness of capitalist civilization.⁹

This naturalisation of capitalist priorities also, by implication, presents the ecological calamities now facing the planet as an almost inevitable by-product of human economic activity, ignoring the specific influences of a particular mode of production.

Similar evasions and occlusions arise when the concept of the Anthropocene is deployed. Those who use the concept do not always acknowledge the extent to which the development of the fossil fuel economy has obeyed capitalist priorities, or admit that other modes of production have been and might be less damaging. They are often silent about the long history of environmental controversy and about the warnings of ecological disaster that were being made many decades ago. The Anthropos which has supposedly now become a geologically shaping force is troublingly unspecific: the term says nothing about the vastly different ecological footprints of different nations, classes and individuals. As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz put it in their helpful historical survey of these issues, ‘whole books can now be written on the ecological crisis, on the politics of nature, on the Anthropocene and the situation of Gaia without so much as mentioning capitalism, war or the United States, even the name of one big corporation ….’¹⁰ They caution us against a ‘grand narrative of the Anthropocene’ whose grandiose focus on interactions between the human species and the Earth system gives comfort to a minority of the planet’s population, overlooks the environmental knowledge and activism of civil society both past and present, and favours the technocratic managerialism of the experts in climate science.¹¹ In their view:

When we consider the multiform and general character of [environmentalist] oppositions and the intensity of environmental reflexivity through time, the major historical problem seems to be not that of explaining the emergence of a new ‘environmental awareness’ but rather to understand how those struggles and warnings could have been kept to the margins by industrialist and ‘progressive’ elites, before being largely forgotten … so that it can be claimed that the discovery that we are living in the Anthropocene is only very recent.¹²

Comparable criticism has been voiced by Jason Moore, who argues that to name the Anthropos as a collective author is mistakenly to endorse a concept of scarcity abstracted from capital, class and colonialism; a neo-Malthusian view of population; and a technical-fix approach to historical change. For Moore, it would be more apt to speak of a Capitalocene era rather than accept the reductive account encouraged by Anthropocene ideology.¹³ Alf Hornborg is less ready to make that direct substitution, pointing out that socialism (at least of the Soviet era) also zealously promoted the fossil fuel economy. But he makes the point that to designate our present time as the Anthropocene risks ignoring the inequalities of capitalism, and might suggest that climate change is the inevitable consequence of how our species is constituted. ‘Although the potential for capitalism is inherent in our species,’ he writes, ‘it is not an inevitable product of our biology, nor something for which we all have a common responsibility.’¹⁴ He also argues that the impasse of the Anthropocene forces us to accept that aspects of our modern thought systems are very poor reflections of the bio-physical world in which we are immersed: a view developed in his powerful critique of the non-naturality of capitalist-inaugurated technology and its central role, alongside money, in concealing the injustice of the hugely asymmetrical bio-physical resource flows in the global economy.¹⁵ Modern, globalised technologies, argues Hornborg, ‘represent not simply politically neutral revelations of possibilities inherent in nature, they are also products of unequal societal relations’.¹⁶ Technological ‘progress’ has to be seen not simply as an index of ingenuity but as a social strategy of appropriation. And within that schema, it is of course always those at the neo-colonised periphery rather than the neo-imperialising centres who suffer most from the consequences of environmental depletion. Genuine progress would be to recognise that ‘since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth and technological progress have served as supremely efficacious strategies for displacing workloads and environmental burdens onto other people and other landscapes. Viewed as strategies to achieve such displacement, they belong to a category of societal arrangements that includes slavery and imperialism.’¹⁷ A more probing analysis would also forego the idea that the ecological ‘debt’ incurred through ongoing unequal exchange, can be understood in monetary terms: ‘money cannot neutralize ecological damage in a physical sense. Monetary compensation for environmental damage can reduce contemporary grievances, but it is illusory to believe that “correct” reparations could be calculated, or that they would somehow set things straight … the ecological debt of Britain, for instance, is as incalculable as its debt to the descendants of West African slaves.’¹⁸

Very relevant to these arguments is Andreas Malm’s counter-intuitive critique of technical-determinist accounts of the ascendancy of capitalism and its pursuit of fossil fuel (a pursuit in which Britain, the generator of 80 per cent of CO2 global emissions in 1825 and 60 per cent a quarter of a century later, led the field).¹⁹ Against what might be called the Promethean myth of the Anthropocene (the view of Mark Lynas and others that it has been the inevitable outcome of the discovery of fire),²⁰ Malm (echoing Marx) insists that a necessary condition for something is not necessarily its cause. The ability to manipulate fire is necessary for a fossil fuel economy but the cause lies elsewhere, most notably in the decisions of those capitalists who owned the means of production and chose to replace water power with steam power. Although the option for steam power was more expensive, it won out, Malm argues, because it better suited capitalist relations of production, not least the capitalists’ preference for private property and for the independence of individual owners and managers, which led them to resist arrangements requiring cooperation among the cotton magnates. Moreover, the steam engine, which required and took advantage of growing urban-isation, was better suited to the de-skilling of workers and the imposition of greater discipline and control.

Malm also shows that the fossil fuel economy has been pursued despite strong opposition. In the nineteenth century, British workers resisted the labour processes imposed by the steam engine; under the Empire, Indian labourers were forced into coal mining. Today, workers continue to resist being dragooned into the extraction and use of fossil fuel. There is, for example, intense and widespread resistance to neo-extractivist pressures in Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America – where this resistance is often based in an indigenous politics deeply tied to a history of resistance to colonialism and neo-imperialism, initially by Europeans and later by the United States (and now increasingly China). These are communities that have been on the sharpest end of a relentless process of colonisation that has sought to establish a globalised and racialised fossil fuel economy and suppressed attempts to stand against it through the harshest means: murder, militarisation, land grabs, displacement and ecological destruction which causes impoverishment and forces local communities into working cheaply for the industry.²¹

There can, then, be no disputing that greed for profit and power has imposed – and continues to impose – a fossil fuel economy to the exclusion of more eco-friendly alternatives. In the process, lives have been wrecked, the environment has been damaged, and Earth’s climate has been altered. We have recently learned that both Exxon and Shell were informed by their researchers in the early 1980s that carbon emissions from fossil fuels would cause calamitous global warming by the middle decades of the present century, but they concealed the evidence from consumers and governments.²² Little has changed since: North America is currently funding 51 per cent of the 302 pipelines in various stages of development around the world (in the US alone the output from these could increase carbon emissions by 559 million tonnes by 2040).²³ The author of a 2018 UN progress report on changes implemented since the Paris Agreement speaks of ‘a huge fight by the fossil fuel industry against cheap renewables. The old economy is well organised and they have put huge lobbying pressure on governments to spend tax money to subsidise the old world.’²⁴ The G20 countries have obliged by increasing subsidies for fossil fuels from $75 billion (£58 billion) to $147 billion (£114 billion) between 2007 and 2016 to allow companies to compete with cheap renewables.²⁵ Consumers have also obliged, by continuing their love affair with the combustion engine and resisting efforts to increase tax on fossil fuels.

Against posthumanist advice on ecological politics

To insist that economic forms and categories have a history and that capitalism is but one possible mode of production is also to insist on sustaining an analytic distinction between nature conceived as an independent entity and permanent ground of all human activity and the social dimension with its political and cultural conditioning of the forms which that human activity takes. Nature on this understanding refers us to the ever-present forces and causal powers that are the condition of, and constraint upon, any human practice, however ambitious.

Despite claims to the contrary, the independent ontological reality of nature in this sense is not contestable. As I argued in my book What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, recognition of the reality of nature so conceived, and its distinction from what is socially and culturally instituted, is indispensable to the coherence of both ecological discourses about the perceptible environment and to claims about the genetically-engineered or cultural ‘construction’ or conditioning of humans, whether physical or psychological.²⁶ It is also, as Malm and Hornborg insist, essential to avoiding fetishised conceptions of the global economy that mislocate the real sources of injustice and environmental damage. We need to contest mainstream presumptions that technology is ‘natural’ and economics purely ‘social’, but to do so we must maintain an analytic divide between the natural and the social in the first place. This requires resistance to some of the more irrational and neo-animist tendencies of contemporary cultural theory.

Despite claims to the contrary, the absorption of nature in culture or culture in nature as advocated by much recent posthumanist thinking should also be resisted as unhelpful to environmental argument. According to the posthumanists, sympathetic responses to ecological issues require us to dispense with the nature–culture binary and the anthropocentric attitudes it has underpinned. Emphasising the relationality and continuity of all being, posthumanists call for a blurring or collapse of what they see as misguided or arrogantly humanist distinctions between ourselves and other animals. Posthumanism in its ‘new materialist’ formulation has also invited us to think of inanimate objects as exercising agency no less extensively and effectively than human beings.²⁷

Philosophical support for this kind of ontological destabilisation and ethical revision has derived from the anti-foundationalist shift associated with post-structuralist theory and philosophy especially from the arguments of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their followers.²⁸ The actor–network theory of Bruno Latour with its resistance to recognising significant differences between the agency of human beings and that of non-human beings and objects has also been very influential.²⁹ The impact of neuroscience on social and cultural theory has likewise played a part, promulgating the idea (which lay people seem increasingly disposed to accept) that we are our brains: that minds and brains are one and the same.³⁰ According to Raymond Tallis, neuroscience has been responsible for the figurative attribution to other animals of human cognitive experiences, a process of ‘Disneyfication’ or a pincer movement in which humans get described in beastly terms, and animals in human terms. Talking down humans by denying them awareness of the nature, purpose and motives of their actions is complemented by talking up animals by anthropomorphising their attributes and behaviour.³¹ An analogy often made in the neuroscientific argument implies that similarities in the behaviours of humans and apes indicate a similarity in the mental states that attend on and generate them.³²

The writings of Donna Haraway and her followers have had a significant and comparable impact on environmental thinking. Defending her ‘cyborg’ ontology, Haraway has invited us to elide not only humans with other animals, but also the organic with the inorganic. The breakdown of these conceptual divisions is acclaimed as both emancipatory for humans and ecologically progressive: as an anti-anthropocentric advance that recognises the parity, connectivity and relationality of all forms of being. In endorsing this approach, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that a primary condition of political progress is that we recognise that

human nature is in no way separate from nature as whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth; … [and] that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures and hybridizations.³³

In their recent ‘accelerationist’ case for a technically driven post-work future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams likewise enthuse about the contribution of ‘cyborg augmentations, artificial life, synthetic biology and technologically mediated reproduction’ to a posthumanist ‘synthetic freedom’, insisting that there is no authentic human essence to be realised and associating all such talk with a limited and ‘parochial’ humanism. (Although quite how this anti-essentialist position coheres with their own polemic against the ills heaped on human beings by capitalism, or their presentation of the contrasting fulfilments to be realised in a post-capitalist future, remains unclear).³⁴

There are notable contrasts between these various types of argument, and it may therefore be misleading to assimilate them under a general posthumanist umbrella (Haraway has herself rejected the term). But they share several themes: the merging of nature and culture; the decentring of the humanist subject; the view that human–animal dualism obstructs ethical guidance on the treatment of non-human animals; a resistance to accepting human exceptionality. There is also, normatively speaking, some general agreement that the ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions now faced by humans and other species has been encouraged by the errors of ‘dualist’ and ‘humanist’ thinking.

Posthumanist theory, however, is produced exclusively by and for human beings and it seeks a response through their particular capacities for adjusting thought and behaviour in the light of argument. It thus relies for its theoretical coherence and ethical appeal on an implicit commitment to distinctively human qualities, and by extension to intentionality and conscious agency. Its critique of humanism is therefore self-subverting, and this surfaces in a particularly acute form in relation to its cyborg thinking and argument on inorganic being. Even those who would have us blur the mind–machine conceptual division, do so on the basis that advanced AI possesses mind- and soul-like qualities. But if these capacities or attributes themselves invoke a regrettably ‘humanist’ estimation of human powers of cognition and reflexivity, implying some preferential evaluation of minds and souls, then why should they be accorded any special attention? There is also some tension involved in maintaining a cyborg disregard for organic–inorganic distinctions while at the same time defending a blurring of the human–animal divide on the grounds that it will issue in more compassionate treatment of non-humans. To protest against the cruelties of agribusiness is surely to protest against the treatment of organic beings as if they were on a par with Cartesian machines and thus indifferent to their suffering.³⁵

There are problems, too, with Deleuzian-influenced eco-critical approaches that refer us to the play of forces through which all living beings are united in a rhizomic universe. Recognition of the relationality of being is, after all, consistent with any and every ethics or politics. Such theory tends to operate at so high a level of abstraction that little guidance is given on the economic and political institutions that might meet its professed objectives. In the absence of that guidance, however, it readily reverts to an essentially descriptive account of actuality: a comprehensive but somewhat scholastic mapping of practices and subjectivities attached to a messianic and hence ultimately evasive politics.³⁶ Rosi Braidotti, for example, has recently written that ‘sustainability expresses the desire to endure, in both space and time. In Spinozist-Deleuzian political terms, this sustainable idea of endurance is linked to the construction of possible futures [… which in turn] entails the collective endeavour to construct social horizons of endurance, which is to say, of hope and sustainability … and hope gives us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines.’³⁷ This is well-meant, but it says very little about where or when or how or by whom any of this creative potential or hope will be mobilised.

Posthumanism, then, undoes itself if it attempts to dispense with human exceptionalism, and the only persuasive discourses offered under its influence are those which are prepared to recognise and talk about the humanism which irreducibly remains in play throughout its questioning of the human. It is fine to point out that we are all inter-connected in nature and share more with other animals than we previously thought. One can also agree with those who argue that what generates our moral response to animals and their treatment is not some distanced and impartial calculation of what consideration is rightfully due to them, but rather our sense of the mortality and vulnerability we share with them, and the compassion that goes with that.³⁸ However, it is precisely with a view to sustaining the philosophical coherence of this position, with its appeal to the distinctive role of human imagination and sympathy in generating a moral response, that we need to defend the difference between humans and other creatures. As Cora Diamond has put it:

… if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, in our appeal, try to obliterate the distinction between human beings and animals and just get people to speak or think of ‘different species of animals’, there is no footing left from which to tell us what we ought to do, because it is not members of one among species of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectations of other human beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and we do something like imaginatively read into animals something like such expectations when we think of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow’s eyes. There is nothing wrong with that; there is something wrong with trying to keep that response and destroy its foundation.³⁹

We need, then, to avoid crassly anthropocentric approaches to human–animal relations. We also, however, need to recognise that it is only humans who are in a position to extend moral consideration to other animals, and that even when posthumanists argue that animals should be treated on a par with human subjects, an appeal is being made to a capacity for moral discrimination that is exclusive to human beings. We also know that no animals can think of themselves as having responsibility towards us in the way that many humans do towards them. I am not denying here that some companion animals, dogs in particular, will sometimes show care and concern for their owners or handlers. What I mean is that other animal species do not conceive of or exercise any universally applicable form of concern for the members of other animal species, humans included. I mean, too, that they have not produced representations of us humans, orally, in writing or pictorially, nor are there philosophical arguments about their relations with us. This surely obliges us to say that they cannot imagine what it is like to be a human being. The sensibility that makes us (or should make us) hesitate about assimilating other animal species too closely to human beings must surely also acknowledge this failure of imaginative reciprocity between ourselves and other creatures. No other animal can recognise a right or feel an obligation to respect it; most other animals appear indifferent to the welfare of other species – fortunately so, in many ways. Most animal species would die of starvation were it not for the suffering of other creatures they catch daily, tear apart and eat alive. Human exceptionality, by contrast, is as readily manifested in extreme empathy with other animals as it is in arrogant disregard for them. We must respect this abyss between humans and non-human animals even as we ponder what to do about it.

In arguing this, I am by no means implying support for simplistic views (such as we find in Biblical and Enlightenment writings) on the right of human beings to exploit the natural world in whatever ways they see fit. I am insisting only that there are properties and powers exclusive to humans, which require us to demarcate clearly between ourselves and other animate beings. The same applies a fortiori in the case of inanimate beings (or objects).We can agree with Latour and the new materialists that objects can have major formative influence on humans and can generate their own consequences. But this is very different from imputing human powers of agency. I dispute the wisdom of those who have lately positioned themselves as friends of nature precisely by denying the subject–object, nature–culture and human–animal distinctions. I am also quarrelling with those who insist on the importance of a redemptive awakening to human continuity with nature, rather than on the (often grim) exceptionality of human economic and social practice. Indeed, if human forms of consciousness and agency are on a par with those of the rest of nature, then no special responsibility for ecological collapse can be attributed to humans, and no eco-political strategies for redemption can be expected of them. Paradoxical as it may seem, the belief that humans occupy no special place in nature is likely to confound rather than advance the ecological cause. As Hornborg argues, the most problematic implication of attempts to dissolve the subject–object distinction

is finally not the fetishistic attribution of agency to non-living entities, but the withdrawal of responsibility and accountability from human subjects. The denial of accountability in human subjects – accomplished by putting them on a par with non-humans – is quite congruent with the relinquishment of responsibility that is implicit in the posthumanist stance of Latour and his followers. The uniqueness of human responsibility – which simply cannot be extended to rivers, volcanoes, or even dogs – remains an insurmountable dilemma for posthumanism.⁴⁰

The assimilation of humans to other animals in terms of their needs and desires (a reductive naturalisation of their consumption) is also an inadequate basis for thinking through the alternative modes of consumption essential to guaranteeing a sustainable future. Non-human animals may emulate each other, and some of them certainly observe their pecking orders, but they do not consume for display or symbolic reasons. They may be deceived in their quests for satisfaction, but non-human animals do not pursue fantastical pleasures, nor are they interested in dissatisfaction as itself a condition of enjoyment. Human consumption, by contrast, is of a two-fold and over-determined character, developed in relation to both needs for physical survival and reproduction and to the more transcendent needs of the spirit (currently much deflected and confounded). What is more, the material objects of human consumption – unlike those of other animals, especially animals in the wild – are seldom stable, but constantly mutating. In consumer culture what we consume has become ever more various, numerous and baroque. Hence my dissent from the suggestion that consumerism’s negative consequences can be corrected by a simple ‘return’ to a naturally fixed and objectively knowable system of need satisfaction. But hence, too, my quarrel with those who tend to treat capitalist consumer culture as if it were the only form in which these distinctive qualities of human consumption could be accommodated; my quarrel, in other words, with those who are inclined to treat it as a natural development.

De-naturalising consumption

I suggested at the outset that Marxist approaches to industrial history are of critical importance in exposing both the distinctive role of capitalism in propelling global warming and environmental degradation, and the various ideological moves that continue to secure its disastrous hegemony. But if Marxism is to avoid becoming merely a historical reflection on what has gone wrong, it surely also needs to provide some guidance on how to put things right – guidance about what could or should replace the capitalist order, and about the forces that might help to promote that. In claiming this, I accept how dire the current situation seems, and how difficult it is to feel anything but pessimistic about the potential for transformation. The reluctance of much contemporary Marxist commentary to speculate on post-capitalist arrangements or on the politics and agents of transition is in this sense understandable. Yet as David Harvey has suggested, the fact that it is precisely because we have been told for so long that there is no post-capitalist alternative that it becomes important to envisage one.⁴¹ A Marxism that can summon no resources for thinking beyond capitalism succumbs to fatalism and thus to a form of idealism that espouses critical ideals which have no basis in reality. The reluctance to confront working-class opposition to socialism, if unsurprising, evades the all-important question as to who might now assume the transformative role that classical Marxism assigned to the proletariat.

I also want to suggest that Marxism today cannot continue to abstract from the role of consumption (including that by the metropolitan working-class) in sustaining capitalism and hence from its contribution to climate change. There is surely a striking contrast between the immiseration of workers in the nineteenth century and the much greater access of the work-force in contemporary industrialised societies to the commodities created through mass production: the now almost universal consumption of cars, air travel, electronic and white goods, home improvements, fashion items and so forth. This type of consumption has now fostered a problematic model of the ‘good life’ even in developing countries. Yet instead of a proper acknowledgement of this, we are too often offered (as in Jason Moore’s recent Capitalism in the Web of Life) a hypostatisation of the system, as if capital itself were responsible and acting autonomously. We are told of capitalism’s ‘arrogance’, its ‘desires’, its ‘choices’, and so on – along with a relative abstraction from the everyday life of ordinary people, either in their role as consumers or in their electoral support for the system. Thus the impression is given that only as workers do most human beings figure in the survival and reproduction of capitalism. Moore recognises that what is at stake today is not only class-struggle, but also ‘a contest between contending visions of life and work’. He says little, however, about how we might develop that claim, and offers no insights on any alternative vision.⁴²

Or again (to take up a point, made by Bonneuil and Fressoz), it may be true that ninety corporations are responsible for 63 per cent of the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and methane produced between 1850 and the present day, but it is important to note that these emissions stem from the production of fossil fuels and concrete used in housing, building projects and in innumerable consumer articles throughout those years.⁴³ It is also true, as Andreas Malm says, that we cannot put the blame for Chinese emissions on Chinese workers⁴⁴, but we do surely have to put some blame on the very ready consumption of the cheap goods they are producing, a readiness shared around the globe and across class lines. We should also acknowledge the indifference on the part of large swathes of the population in affluent nations to the sweatshop conditions in which these goods are often produced, and the resistance of many workers to the imposition of fuel tax, or the curbing of today’s dependency on car travel and cheap flights. As I write, the British Prime Minister is promising to freeze fuel tax – a promise campaigned for by the Sun newspaper and intended primarily to woo ‘hard-working families’. Few among those welcoming the promise, one suspects, will agonise much over the illegal levels of air pollution currently condoned by the government, or over the recent imprisonment of those protesting against fracking, or even over the dire predictions of the IPPC Report on global warming released within days of Prime Minister Theresa May’s address to her Party conference in 2018. In France, meanwhile, in a comparable, if more explosive scenario, President Macron has been forced to withdraw his planned raising of the fuel tax in an attempt to quell the Gilets Jaunes protests it generated.

It is true that the huge inequalities generated by neo-liberal policies in recent years have seriously undermined the social solidarity essential to the successful introduction of environmental taxation on everyday consumer goods.⁴⁵ But to recognise the negative impact of austerity measures and inequality on the support for higher duties on fuel is one thing. It is another to ignore the extent to which workers as consumers are collusive in the reproduction of the capitalist economy – an issue on which much of the left has so far been extremely evasive. Furthermore, however critical they may be of capitalism in other respects, socialists are still much too ready to subscribe to conventional views on the ‘good life’ and what constitutes a ‘high’ standard of living.

Those who object to attributing all environmental wrong-doing to the capitalist West while ignoring the ecological devastation of the Soviet regime are surely on target. But things might have been different had the Soviet leaders been less enamoured of the Western model of consumption and energy provision, and more revolutionary in their thinking on human prosperity – had they been less ready, in other words, to ‘naturalise’ the consumption associated with capitalism. The point made some while ago by James O’Connor is still relevant here:

An uncritical acceptance of Western-style development led to its mechanical imitation in socialist countries. The progress of socialism too often has been measured by its ability to keep pace with or outdistance, as with Sputnik, the West’s most technologically advanced accomplishments. In the course of this race, the idea of a qualitatively different type of progress, one measured by the quality of life rather than the quantity of technology or consumer goods, has been systematically suppressed.⁴⁶

So, too, in many ways, is the rallying call of Rudolf Bahro, another early red-green thinker,

Our customary idea of the transition to socialism is the abolition of the capitalist order within the basic conditions European civilisation has created in the field of techniques and technology – and not in Europe alone. Even in this century, a thinker as profound as Antonio Gramsci was still able to view technique, industrialism, Americanism, the Ford system in its existing form as by and large an inescapable necessity, and thus depict socialism as the genuine executor of human adaptation to modern machinery and technology. Marxists have so far rarely considered that humanity has not only to transform its relations of production, but must also fundamentally transform the entire character of its mode of production, i.e. the productive forces, the so-called techno-structure. It must not see its perspective as bound up with any historically transmitted form of the development of needs and their satisfaction, or of the world of products designed for this purpose. The commodity world that we find around us is not in its present form a necessary condition for human existence. It does not have to look the way it does in order for human beings to develop both intellectually and emotionally as far as we would like.⁴⁷

It would be a pity if those responsible for the innovative arguments on ecology that have been developed of late within historical materialism were not to extend their insights onto capitalism as a perverse and dystopian biospheric organisation in order to provide an equally luminous de-naturalising assault on capitalism’s anachronistic conceptions of human prosperity and well-being. The definition of progress in terms of capitalist-driven technology and industrialisation can no longer be left unchallenged; nor can nations with the least sustainable environmental footprint any longer be allowed to figure as models of the good life for the developing nations.⁴⁸ A less techno-driven and growth-oriented organisation of nature has now to be viewed as offering more advanced norms of welfare and modes of providing it.

Orthodox Marxists may object, but those working within a broadly historical materialist framework of thinking must now encompass the politicisation of consumption, rather than restricting their focus to production and worker exploitation. They need to be as critical of capitalism’s success in promoting the consumerist lifestyle as if this were the only one worth having as they have been of the naturalisation of its reliance on fossil fuel. They must allow criticism, too, of Marx’s more extravagant claims about what a post-capitalist future could deliver. ‘An abundance of needs’, ‘distribution according to needs’ – heady though such slogans may be, they can no longer figure as appropriate summations of what could be achieved under socialism. Hence my own quarrel with the detached radicalism of some academic Marxists who have been happy to repeat the gesture towards an ever-receding utopian horizon of universal plenitude in order to spare themselves engagement in the necessary, though troublesome, reconstruction of the Marxian message on post-capitalist society. A cultural politics that sniffs at the idea of moderating consumption is clinging to an outdated set of assumptions about what would constitute post-capitalist forms of industry, labour process and worker emancipation. Nor can the left continue to advocate equal, universal access to Western affluent standards of living, not even if their production were to be revolutionised in ways that freed it from the exploitations of heteronomous labour. Demands for full employment, the end of austerity and economic security for all have to be coupled with, even replaced by, demands for a post-growth economic order based on fairness in global distribution and an essentially reproductive order of material consumption. This in turn will require a revolution in our thinking about the very nature of progress and prosperity – a revolution that challenges the idea that consumer culture delivers the good life even to those with the means to buy its goods, that undermines attempts to maintain the hegemony of work over our lives and value system, and that highlights the pleasures for everyone of a less speed-driven, time-scarce, acquisitive way of living. Only if the left commits itself to an alternative politics of prosperity along these lines have we any real hope of setting off the relay of pressures that might issue in an effective mandate for change.

While I have a quarrel with those who would treat consumption as a nugatory factor in the ‘crime’ of the fossil fuel economy, I am equally reluctant to discount the possible role of revised ideas about prosperity, consumption and the ‘good life’ in leveraging some more radical economic transformation. The IPPC report of October 2018 charged states with a ‘moral responsibility’ to act with immediate and radical effect on global warming and presented them as the main agent of change. Since then there has been some state acknowledgement of our ‘climate emergency’. But based on their record, it is difficult to see states committing to the radical action that is needed without being pressured to do so. But who will exert that pressure? Malm suggests that it would be folly to trust to consumers to change their habits and demands.⁴⁹ He is by no means alone in this, and he may well be right. But by his own argument, it would be even more absurd to put one’s faith in corporate elites to enforce state action in the creation of a just and sustainable future. Nor, surely, can we any longer expect meaningful opposition to the status quo to be initiated by a concerted proletarian movement. Paul Mason may be mistaken in claiming that everyone is now capable of becoming an agent of transformation thanks to global networking, but he is surely right in suggesting that those who cling to the idea that the proletariat is the only force that can push society beyond capitalism have failed to see how extensive and diverse the potential agency for change has now become.⁵⁰ In any case, the proletariat in Marx’s now classic understanding of it as the class of immiserated factory-workers opposed to the bourgeois class and seeking its overthrow no longer corresponds to the realities of the contemporary capitalist formation and its possible sources and agents of transformation.

Foolhardy as it may be, I am therefore offering, in the ensuing chapters, a review and critique of affluent consumer culture that challenges a left–right consensus about its pleasures and its inevitability as a model of the ‘good life’, while highlighting the disruptive political potential of contests about consumption.