Pirate's Cove

What is Jacobin? “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” It’s lauded by hard left folks like Chris Hayes, Noam Chomskey, and Doug Henwood. Is it any surprise they are big fans of Doing Something about ‘climate change’?

“Awareness” Will Not Save Us From Climate Disaster

In the mid-2000s, there was a real sense of momentum in climate politics. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was heralded as the Silent Spring of our generation; sure to mobilize millions to the climate fight. In the same year, economist Nicholas Stern alarmed the policy world with his Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a seven-hundred-page report predicting that the costs of climate change could amount to between 5 and 20 percent of GDP. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth assessment report, laying out the dire science and the rapid changes needed.

Comparing Gore’s movie to Silent Spring is perfect, since Silent Spring was a scientific mess, and lead to countless deaths from Malaria via stopping the use of DDT. Gore’s movie also was ripe with shoddy science and full of emotional blackmail. Anyhow, the piece goes through many paragraphs about spreading awareness, ie, doomsaying, and such before

Yet after the seeming momentum of 2007–8, it all went sideways. The global capitalist economy collapsed, the United States reassumed its role as delayer in Copenhagen — and to this day, the climate movement still has not ignited the kind of transformative change needed. In fact, McKibben consistently and correctly points out that we are losing the climate fight, and badly.

What are the limits of making climate politics about knowledge? This kind of politics of knowledge appeals to a specific class position: the professional class. I define the professional class broadly as those who marshal degrees, licenses, and other credentials in the market for labor power. Like McKibben and his “group of university friends,” the professional class still remains at the core of the climate movement — scientists, journalists, and college students.

So, the Elites and those who think they are elites. The people whom Doing Something really won’t affect negatively. Also, ones who rarely practice what they preach. And, for all the yammering in the screed about The Science, this sure seems to break down into Marxist views of the working class vs the Elites. Most of the article is about this, ending with

While professional class sensibilities tend to assume solving climate change requires making these things cost more to “internalize” the costs of emissions, socialists can counter with a decarbonization program that guarantees access to these basic needs of working-class life. The 2018–20 explosion of Green New Deal proposals espousing this vision have sputtered lately, but we cannot lose sight of this basic insight that we should reorient climate policies toward direct improvements to workers’ lives who have suffered decades of neoliberal austerity and assault from the capitalist class war.

So, more Government? Interestingly, in the Political Science definition of Socialism, there are three things that make it up. First, the government being heavily involved in the economy, up to and including owning the means of production. That’s the Economic Core. In the Political Core, virtually mob rule, with voting on everything by the citizens, and few restrictions on who can vote. You’ve heard the term “direct democracy?” That’s what it is. Third is the Moral Core, and, with Socialism, it means that government almost fully stays out of the lives of citizens. And that’s where this breaks, because the Left wants very much to control the lives of citizens. ‘Climate change’ is a great way to accomplish this, because it is For Your Own Good.

Read: Jacobin Magazine Says Spreading Awareness Will Not Stop Climate Doom »