Monbiot betrays his class bias
September 3rd, 2008
George Monbiot, darling of the grass roots climate movement, has this week ruffled some feathers amongst the activists he professes to admire. He made a scathing attack on the leftist organisers of the Kingsnorth climate camp, that in his own words was amongst “the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them.” Monbiot takes a stab at the non-hierarchical politics of those same organisers in his column of August 22 on Monbiot.com
Specifically, Monbiot criticizes the commentary of organiser Ewa Jaciewicz, a self-professed anarchist who says the issue of climate change can’t be addressed without changing the system. In her piece, Jaciewicz criticizes Monbiots advocation of the state and corporations as tools to solve the climate crisis. She links the actions of the climate campers to that of the 90s anti-roads reclaim-the-streets movement, and back to the working class “Diggers, Levellers and Luddites” movements who opposed measures by the English monarchy to empower industrialists at the price of rights for the workers. She maintains that because Monbiot doesn’t see those links to revolution, he simply didn’t ‘get’ what the camp was about. Evidently Monbiot doesn’t like revolutionaries talking about revolution in his earshot. Either that or his arrogant intellectualism didn’t appreciate the criticism. Clearly the camps, the protests and their organisation structures worked, but don’t use the (A) word please!
So who’s right? While celebrities like Monbiot and Al Gore make a living off their popularity, they are essentially only talking to upper-middle class sensibilities. To the well-off, climate change may well seem like the cause of the day and no doubt they are bewildered as to why the huddled masses don’t rise up and do something about it. Change a few light-bulbs, buy a hybrid car or two for instance.
Its obvious that Monbiot is of the ‘command and control’ school of environmental policy, or ‘totalitarianism’ as he calls it. His argument is very much like that I’ve had innumerable times with socialists re: putting off our basic rights until ‘after the revolution’. It’s easy for Monbiot, in a comfy middle-class existence, to see climate change as the only issue. Obviously he doesn’t have to worry about feeding his kids, paying his rent or losing his job at the Leyland plant.
Dying from starvation is probably a more immediate threat to more people than climate change. But Monbiot doesn’t live in a world where he can see more than one means meeting an end. Just as it’s not immediately obvious that improving women’s rights decreases the birth rate, it’s probably not obvious to him that improving workers rights might alleviate climate change.
But revolutions are necessary to make the radical change that will be required to stop living unsustainably. And here we are no longer talking about just fixing the climate. Unsustainable practices are manifest in all places: the way we work, the way we live, the way we grow our food, the games we play. And it is capitalism that dictates how these things are done: reducing labour costs by depriving labour of rights, sending work to the 2/3 world where workers have no rights; suburbia a sprawling mess of roads that alienate pedestrians and cyclists and alienate us from each other in our self-contained energy consuming, appliance filled ‘castles’ sold to us by the marketing corporations as the ‘dream’; our food grown in massive mono cultures where energy intensive machinery and chemicals have become necessities given that the farms must produce ever more to pay for those gadgets and the rest of us have forgotten how to grow our food, and finally the ‘distracting industries’ (sport, movies, games) all geared at taking up our spare time so we can forget what ails us and hence make no plans to take back what is rightfully ours - our freedom.
Ultimately it is about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: if we get our basic needs for safety, food, and love out the way we can afford the luxury of caring about others, even abstract thought. But clearly the system we do have is not meeting those basic needs. We are insecure about our lives, we have so many possessions that we fear losing them, we fear losing our jobs and being unable to meet mortgage payments, we need to drive long distances, spend long hours away from loved ones and live in dormitory suburbs, we eat junk because we have no time to grow and prepare food for ourselves. We are tired and hate our jobs but we do these things to survive in the working world capitalism has created. We do these things because capitalism has sold us on the idea that this is the good life, it is ’success’ and yet it’s never enough.
It takes abstract thought, freeing yourself from the pursuit of the ‘dream’ to envision another world as the climate campers do. We also need to rethink our lives, and our world to solve climate change. No market-based approach that relies on rich people spending more and poor people working more to produce those goods is going to save us. Yet Monbiot criticizes this, suggesting that it’s ‘one day, Capitalism. Anarchism the next’ and that the first thing that will happen in this situation is that “every Daily Mail reader in the country will pick up a gun and go and kill the nearest hippy.”
It’s going to be a slow process of winning rights for workers, for women, for indigenous people, for the environment - empowering the oppressed and decaying the right to exploit of the privileged. But that revolution starts in the mind, and Monbiot can’t conceive of it.
Except for the elite upper classes in government and industry, everyone in the world has the skills and collective power to make real change. Of course the elites don’t want us to realise this, and keep us at loggerheads, greenies against workers, against minorities, against immigrants - anyone but the real culprits for our unjust lives: government and corporations. Keep us fighting amongst ourselves so that we see only their solutions: market-based ones that essentially keep the rest of the system in place while placing the onus on consumers to make the change. They want us to think that is the only power we have, because it keeps them in power. So we have seen the gradual stripping of hard won rights for workers, women, indigenous people. Work choices has still not entirely been repealed, women still earn less than men on average and in the NT the aboriginal discrimination act was repealed.
We are all fighting for the same things: a clean, safe, secure future for ourselves and our children. Until we unite with these causes, something many climate campers see more clearly than the likes of Monbiot, there will be no solutions to global problems like climate change. We shouldn’t have to give up the social revolution to solve climate change.
Categories: anarchist theory, direct action, environment, media, social justice | Tags: coal, environment
