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Showing posts with label Simon Pirani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon Pirani. Show all posts
Simon Pirani ☭ This article is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday-2-December


Making ecosocialism a reality is obviously a huge, many-sided collective task and here I just highlight three aspects of it. First, the ways in which the war in Gaza, that has taken up so much of all our attention in recent weeks, is relevant to it. Second, about capitalism’s impact on the environment, specifically with respect to global warming. And third some points about how we might develop ecosocialist ideas.

1. War and climate change

The connections between war and climate change are complex and go to the heart of the way the society we live in works. Thinking about these is a collective task we need to work on over time. Here are some points for discussion.

A year on, that’s still right. London demonstration, November 2022.
Photo by Steve Eason

It has been suggested that a key cause of the war in Gaza is for control over fossil fuel resources. I do not agree with this: I think it’s a related, but secondary, issue. Gaza was occupied by Israel in 1967, more than 30 years before gas was discovered in the East Mediterranean. Even in 2007, when Hamas took over in Gaza and the territory was blockaded by Israel, no exploration work had been done on the major gas fields. Although one undeveloped field is in Gazan territorial waters, the larger, producing fields are in Egyptian and Israeli waters.

The war is much more about land and water, than about gas or oil. It is driven by political factors: the Israeli government’s determination to pursue ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, and the western powers’ determination to use Israel as a strategic bulwark in the Middle East.

The connections with climate change are deeper and more complex than a simple resource grab, in my view. I will highlight two of these.

One is that the war brings home the frightful reality of the United Nations and other institutions of so-called international governance. All the decisions by these institutions and the peace agreements of the 1990s, that pointed towards a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, have effectively been junked in the last two months.

The war in Gaza, like the Russian war against Ukraine, is a symptom of the deep crisis of international governance. And it is these same institutions that are supposedly coordinating efforts to prevent dangerous climate change.

Those efforts supposedly started with the Rio treaty in 1992; since then, the rate at which greenhouse gases are being poured into the atmosphere has risen by about 60%.

The discourse around the annual climate talks, centred on technofixes, on the fraudulent concept of “green growth” and on misuse of the idea of “net zero”, is used to facilitate ecological destruction: this is a failure of statecraft on a world scale. The latest scandal, of this year’s talks in the United Arab Emirates being used as an opportunity to discuss new oil and gas production deals, is the outcome.

All this has political implications. Many organisations focused on climate frame their policies in terms of demands on the UN and the nations participating in the climate talks. We need to think about this.

A second connection between war and climate crisis has to do with the modern form of imperialism. Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, and western support for it, is part of a broader complex of political and economic relationships, by which the rich countries of the global north exercise control over international trade and the economy.

The war in Gaza is a shocking reminder of the violence that is central to those relationships. Climate change is already producing conditions in which that violence will be exacerbated: it has made disasters such as last year’s floods in Pakistan, and recent floods and droughts in sub Saharan Africa, far, far more likely.

All this, too, has political implications. We need to think about how we understand these connections, how they are manifested in our lives, and how people like ourselves in the global north can forge alliances with those who confront these conditions more directly.

2. Capitalism and the environment: global warming

The emission of greenhouse gases, mainly from fossil fuel burning, is the main cause of global heating. It is the most immediately threatening way that capitalism is rupturing humanity’s relationship with the natural world. This rupture is also destroying biodiversity, disrupting the nitrogen balance and doing other damage; I will not cover those things in this short article.

The point I want to underline about fossil fuels is that while we can and should denounce oil, gas and coal companies for producing them, and for their disgusting profiteering, our political efforts to tackle global warming need also to focus on consumption of fossil fuels.

We need to develop an understanding of consumption counterposed to mainstream analyses, that focus on consumption by individuals and households – and, by doing so, take attention away from the systems by and through which most fossil fuels are consumed.

These are technological systems – such as electricity networks, built environments, transport systems, industrial, agricultural and military systems – that are in turn embedded in social and economic systems.

Take transport systems, for example. While it’s right and proper to target aviation in general and private jets in particular, which are such egregious examples of luxury consumption that can not in any way be categorised as meeting human need, the much bigger challenge is the car-centred urban transport systems of the global north. These are more present in all our lives, and account for a much greater chunk of emissions.

We need a politics of transport that counters the technofix of electric vehicles, a centrepiece of the ruinous climate politics that is driving the world to disaster. This is about how we live in cities, and what all those journeys – often to “bullshit jobs” – are for in the first place.

In south-east London I have been involved in a campaign to stop the supposedly climate-conscious Labour mayor building a new road tunnel under the Thames, which is the sort of project that should be forbidden by any local or national government that pretends to care about climate change.

We have not stopped the tunnel, but we have not stopped organising either, and we are now discussing expanding our campaign, to demand free public transport in London. This is the sort of sweeping measure that is desperately needed, both to combat climate change and to address the cost-of-living crisis.

This brings us to the question of political strategies to address climate-related issues. I would suggest three priorities:

First, we have urgently to develop policies that both cut greenhouse gas emissions and also address issues of social justice. Free public transport, to cut the volume of road traffic, is an example. “Insulate Britain”, which both cuts unnecessary consumption of gas and cuts people’s energy bills, is another. A third, more long-term, is for the development of socially-controlled renewable electricity networks.

Remember that during the Yellow Vests movement in France, which started around a diesel tax increase that was justified by the government as a climate-related measure, the slogan was coined, “you talk about the end of the world, I worry about the end of the month”. Policies such as free public transport, and for a massive retrofit programme of insulation and heat pump installation, respond to this.

Such policies cut across false claims (from both Tory and Labour MPs) that climate policies will cost ordinary people money, and stories about the rights of individual car drivers (around which the extreme right have tried to mobilise).

Second, we need to acknowledge the role of civil disobedience. I have heard many critiques of the tactics of, for example, Just Stop Oil: I think many of these critiques are valid. But civil disobedience is playing a role, and will continue to do so: in Germany we have seen it organised on a mass scale involving thousands of people.

Third, we in the rich countries need to make real, practical connections with movements in the global south around ecological issues, such as in Ecuador, where many years of campaigning resulted in the recent referendum decision to halt oil production from a part of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

3. Ecosocialism

Here are four areas of discussion that I think we could prioritise, in order to define more clearly what we actually mean by ecosocialism.

First: ecosocialists are very good at describing the future they are aiming for, but much less good at discussing how we might achieve it, that is, the transition away from capitalism. This point has been made very well in a recent article by Michael Albert (the Edinburgh-based researcher, not the US-based anarchist of the same name), and I think it should be addressed. Albert writes:

Ecological Marxists have succeeded in developing compelling ecological critiques of capitalism and principles for alternative ecosocialist political economies. However, they have devoted relatively little attention to strategic questions, such as: How might ecosocialist transitions take place? What are the challenges, trade-offs, and risks they would likely confront? And how may ecosocialists and allied movements best strategise to navigate them?

Second, I see little engagement by ecosocialists with the vital political debates between climate scientists, for example the current discussion between James Hansen, Michael Mann and others about the extent to which global warming will continue as and when greenhouse gas emissions start to fall.

Right here in the UK, we could engage with those climate scientists who have become politically outspoken, such as Kevin Anderson, the most vociferous critic of the UN talks process and the fraudulent misuse of the concept of “net zero”. His latest article on COP 28 is essential reading, in my view.

There are also energy systems researchers, such as the group headed by Arnalf Grubler and Charlie Wilson, who produced a blueprint for the world economy to move away from fossil fuels in a socially just way.

Third, we desperately need to develop a socialist critique of technology, standing in the tradition established by the Luddites more than 200 years ago, with their programme to “put down all machinery hurtful to commonality”.

The work done by socialist scholars in the 1970s and 80s has been built on, for example, by Les Levidow. Unfortunately such work is overshadowed by an excessive focus on writers who, like Matt Huber, support nuclear, or Andreas Malm and Holly Buck, who advocate geoengineering. Whatever valuable things these people have written in the past, the “techno modernist” politics they now embrace can not be part of any serious discussion.

Fourth and finally, we need to get a handle on how socialist ideas can be enriched by analysis of the unsustainable material throughput that characterises late capitalism, the focus of much “degrowth” research.

Rather than the superficial point-scoring that has dominated some recent debates, I suggest we discuss serious contributions, such as, for example, the book A Social Ecology of Capital by Eric Pineault. He takes the Marxist approach to the economy as production, circulation and distribution of commodities, and, building on research in the field of industrial ecology, presents an analysis of the world economy as: extraction: production: consumption: dissipation.

There is work on the “imperial mode of living”, by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, which tries to analyse the complex mixture of material overconsumption and inequality that pervades the economies of rich countries. And there is very practical work about unsustainable economic practices in different sectors, such as the research on the built environment by Linda Clarke and others at the University of Westminster.

These are some of the discussions we could pursue, in order to define more clearly what ecosocialism means.

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Defining Ecosocialism

Simon Pirani ☭ Reposted from Spectre journal, with thanks.

7-November-2023
Any socialist vision of the future must deal with global heating and other ways that capital has ruptured humanity’s relationship with the natural world. That means specifying how fossil fuels may be driven out of the economy – and that, in turn, means considering reducing total material throughput, and using the potential of renewable electricity generation.

Against this background, the dramatic shift that has begun in the electricity industry deserves our attention. Economically, oil, gas and coal still dominate energy production – not only to generate electricity, but also in transport and industry, for heat and so on – and hoover up hundreds of billions of dollars a year in state subsidies.

Residential rooftop solar. Creative commons photo
But solar and wind power are starting to expand rapidly, not only in the US and some European countries but also in China. Capital is pouring into these technologies, with more money going to solar than to upstream oil investment globally for the first time in 2022. Engineers’ attention is increasingly focused on how networks can operate when dominated by these variable[1] renewables.

This shift is fraught with dangers; large sections of capital see renewables as an addition to fossil fuels to help drive endless expansion, and the supply chains for the minerals needed are no less exploitative and extractive than those for oil or uranium.

Nevertheless, socialists have good reasons to welcome renewables.

They are secure, very-low-carbon sources of electricity that – in the context of far-reaching economic changes that reduce overall material and energy throughput – can be used to tackle dangerous global heating. Future electricity systems can and should be based on these technologies.

Furthermore, because renewables are deployed at both smaller scales (rooftop solar panels or single wind turbines) and larger ones, they have the potential – if combined with publicly- or commonly-owned networks that treat electricity as a commons rather than a commodity – to empower communities and push back corporate control.

Renewables are now under attack, however, from ecomodernists who see “big” technologies (e.g. nuclear power, carbon capture and geoengineering) as the means to deal with global heating. They have two types of arguments.

The first is that electricity networks simply can not handle renewables-dominated generation. This is disproved not only by the smooth working, now, of networks either dominated by variable renewables (Scotland, with 60%) or soon to be dominated by them (Spain and Germany), but also by years of engineering practice and academic research showing that the required changes to energy grids are difficult but eminently possible. (I have written about this elsewhere.[2])

A second set of specifically “left” ecomodernist arguments, to which I respond in this article, falsely present renewables as inherently linked to private capital, and nuclear as inherently linked to public ownership.

Most recently, Marxist geographer Matt Huber has made this case on the UnHerd web site,[3] claiming that environmentalists and leftists who embrace renewable electricity are being dragged along behind an “anti-social [neoliberal] reaction against society itself”. This colourful pronouncement builds on pro-nuclear arguments by Huber and Fred Stafford in the socialist journals Jacobin and Catalyst,[4] and on Huber’s responses to “degrowth”.[5]

Here, I focus on the false logic that:

♞ Renewables, decentralisation, private capital, and neoliberalism go together; and that

♞ Nuclear, centralisation, public power, and socialism go together.

Here are seven reasons why this logic is flawed.

1. Neoliberalism in the 1970s and 80s was a centrally-directed reorganisation of capital’s power that strengthened centralised multinational corporations. It was not aimed at economic or technological decentralisation.

Huber claims that, in pursuit of private power, neoliberalism set out to demolish “large, rigid institutions” – unions, universities, even monopolistic corporations – that lay at the heart of the post-war boom, “in favour of smaller, more flexible production guided by a decentralised price mechanism”. He argues that this supposed “decentralisation” underpinned the rise of renewable electricity generation.

But even in its use of price mechanisms, neoliberalism was the very opposite of “decentralised”. The weapons it wielded on behalf of big, centralised corporations included the deregulation of finance capital, by such measures as abolition of capital controls and expansion of offshore financial zones. Financial markets were “globalised”, in many cases subordinating national markets to internationally-determined prices. No decentralisation here.

Huber cites the neoliberal ideologue Friedrich Hayek writing about “decentralised planning”. But those words tell us little or nothing about the neoliberalism that actually existed, which Marxists long ago understood as a renewal and reorganisation of capital’s political and economic power: primarily a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” rather than a “utopian project to realise a theoretical design [of markets]”, as David Harvey wrote.[6]

2. Market liberalisation in the US electricity sector tilted the balance away from (mostly publicly owned) utilities towards merchant generators. This was not “decentralisation” but a shift of power towards private capital. A simultaneous trend, not just in the US but globally, was towards physically smaller power stations, mainly gas-fired or combined heat and power plants. Except in Denmark, physically decentralised renewables (solar and wind) would not be significant electricity generators for another two decades.

Huber writes that neoliberal ideology “seized the [US] electricity sector” in the late 1970s; that for neoliberals, electric utilities “epitomised the kind of inflexible and corrupt institutions targeted for demolition”; and that environmentalist ideology of the time (epitomized by Amory Lovins’ “soft energy path”) “conformed to this neoliberal critique of ‘big’ and ‘centralised’ utilities.” Thus, “against a complex and centrally-planned system, ‘grassroots’ local communities aspired to get off the grid entirely,” while at the policy level a “vision of a decentralised renewable-powered utopia actually accompanied a broader project of electricity deregulation” under president Jimmy Carter.

This sounds like a compelling narrative, but it does not hold up to scrutiny.

First, let’s put aside local communities who aspired to get off the grid. How that played out may be significant in the history of counter-culture, but they played no part in battles over energy policy.

Second, burgeoning neoliberalism was not the only factor determining energy policy in the US and other rich countries in the 1970s. After the assertion of pricing power by the Middle Eastern oil producers in 1973, the dominant narrative was of “energy crisis”, rooted in the dominant capitalist powers’ alarm at shifting terms of trade. This produced a politically-driven investment boom in nuclear and other non-fossil energy that both overlapped with, and cut across, market liberalisation policies.

Third, the minute quantities of renewable electricity generated in the mid-1980s were produced by corporations that relied on government support and Wall Street banks for their very survival. Huber calls them “a new class of capitalists building renewable energy projects” (a strange use of the word “class”). This group “need not care about the grid as a shared social system” but could focus on outbidding others in wholesale electricity markets. But their brief attempts to enter those markets was a catastrophic failure.

In the early 1970s, the development of wind turbines was undertaken not by “a new class of capitalists”, but by NASA. A small portion of the state funding was made available for small turbines, and by 1978 one commercial wind turbine was in operation. Then followed the wind “boom” of the 1980s in California, supported by around $1 billion of Wall Street finance. It peaked in 1987. Then construction slumped. During the 1990s, the entire US wind industry produced, on average, 3.3 Terawatt hours per year, less than one typical coal- or gas-fired power station’s output.

Huber states that the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) helped wind power. So it did. But a far more important factor was the Energy Tax Act – which enabled investors to receive a guaranteed profit from wind projects even without generating any electricity (so much for neoliberal market mechanisms). This tax dodge was junked by the 1986 Tax Reform Act and the “boom” collapsed.[7] Wind power emerged as a significant factor in the US only in the mid-2000s. This is shown in the graphic: the bar denoting wind power is invisible until then, while the one denoting solar power cannot be discerned until the 2010s.
In other words, there is no meaningful causal connection between Lovins’s “soft energy paths” argument (which in the 1970s was focused primarily on energy conservation and cogeneration, and not on renewable power),[8] Carter’s PURPA, neoliberal markets, and the expansion of decentralised renewables a quarter of a century later.

Certainly, PURPA weakened the utilities, and reinforced the wholesale electricity market’s role in managing sources of generation. Gas played an increasing role, putting coal on the defensive. But the overarching theme here is not decentralisation, but political support by neoliberal politicians for gigantic corporations.

The frenzied logic of capitalist expansion, with construction companies and generators lobbying heavily, led to an excess of generating capacity – in 1982, amounting to about 40% of the total. Capitalist markets did what they do, and many large projects, especially nuclear, collapsed. The Washington Public Power Supply System (now Energy Northwest) cancelled four out of five nuclear plants it had begun, triggering a bond default in 1982 that, at the time, was the world’s biggest.[9]

To tell this story as one in which renewables are identified with neoliberalism, and nuclear with public power, is to rewrite history in the service of ecomodernist ideology.

3. Socialists who advocated decentralised and locally-controlled energy technologies in the 1970s and 80s were neither allies of neoliberalism nor opponents of technological development: on the contrary, they framed their visions explicitly in terms of anti-capitalism and aspirations for public and collective forms of ownership.

Huber writes, with reference to the 1980s:

[I]f most of the 20th century was about large-scale social integration of complex industrial societies, the neoliberal turn represents an anti-social reaction against society itself. For parts of the right, there was ‘no such thing’ as society, only individuals. But the environmental Left made a comparable turn: large-scale complex industrial society was rejected in favour of a small-scale communitarian localism. In this framework, ‘communities’ could opt out of society and usher in democratic control over energy, food and life.

In support of this claim, Huber quotes the German philosopher Rudolf Bahro saying that “we must build up areas liberated from the industrial system”.

The “left” is such a general category as to be pretty well useless, in my view. But however widely you define it, Bahro in the 1980s ceased to be representative of it. He no longer thought of himself as part of the left, and called for dialogue between the left and right, even extreme right. His colleagues did not view him as part of the left by this point either, with his. “radical anti-modernism” constituting a “fundamental divide” with the left.[10]

In contrast to Bahro’s drift to anti-industrial environmentalism, there is a wealth of socialist writing that saw capitalist social relations as the underlying cause of the 1970s “energy crisis” and environmental crises more broadly. For example:

♞ The Italian autonomists who urged a “post-nuclear transition”, by way of research of alternative energy sources “on a democratic and decentralised basis”, to lay the foundations for “a new energy strategy at the level of more advanced technology”. This, they believed, “implies making choices which qualitatively transform not only energy use but also the capitalist mode of production and its social organisation”.[11] No “small-scale communitarian localism” here.

♞ The US socialist writer Barry Commoner, who, summarising his view of the way to prevent “the assault on the environment”, argued for “the transformation of the present structure of the technosphere, bringing it into harmony with the ecosphere”. This would mean “massively redesigning the major industrial, agricultural, energy and transportation systems”; such a “transformation of the systems of production conflicts with the short-term profit-maximising goals that now govern investment decisions”. This is the very opposite of a rejection of industrial society.[12]

♞ Even André Gorz, perhaps the 1980s’ most forceful socialist proponent of decentralised energy, saw its development as inextricably bound up with social transformation. He addressed the issue explicitly. Objections could be raised to a focus on such technologies, on the grounds that “it is impossible to change the tools without transforming society as a whole, and that this can not be accomplished without gaining control over the state”, he wrote. “This objection is valid, providing it is not taken to mean that societal change and the acquisition of state power must precede technological change. For without changing the technology, the transformation of society will remain formal and illusory.”[13]

Huber’s blanket accusations against the “left”, whatever that is, are cynical and unfounded. Worse, they obstruct a real discussion about the various historical strands of socialist environmentalism and what is to be learned from them in the 21st century.

4. The social forces that promoted wind and solar technologies in the 20th century were the state, and (especially in Europe) social movements. Private capital moved in later.

In the US, the state was the main driving force for the development and diffusion of wind power in the 1980s (see point 2 above). The state also played the main role internationally, but social movements also counted.

In Denmark, the world’s leading developer of wind power in the 20th century, the initial impetus came from a community movement based on co-operatives: by the mid 1980s, there were 150,000 of them. Preben Maegaard, a leading wind power activist, argued in a retrospective analysis that the state, having by the 1990s accepted that wind would be the dominant electricity generator, worked to shift power away from communities into corporate hands.[14]

In Germany, social and political forces worked together in a different configuration: a parliamentary alliance of Social Democrats and Greens fought for subsidies that supported renewables development by both corporate and municipal entities. By the 2000s, similar rules were being adopted across the European Union.[15] There was and is a tension between such state support and the market liberalisation ethos that dominates EU policy.

As a recent report by the European Public Service Unions concluded, “public support for renewables” (which they support) was incompatible with “competition policies” (which they oppose). “In other words, energy liberalisation is clearly at odds with decarbonising energy policies.”[16]

In the 2010s and 2020s, the most rapid expansion of wind and solar electricity generation was and is in China, where investment policy and industrial strategy are firmly state-directed. It goes alongside continued expansion of climate-trashing coal. Elsewhere, state support has started to give way to private capital in recent years, as the cost of supplying renewably-generated electricity to fossil-fuel-dominated grids has fallen sharply. Large amounts of capital are flowing into wind and solar as a consequence.

There is a relationship – though not a straightforward or direct one – between these social and economic changes, and technological changes. Both solar and wind technologies have been impacted by the “third industrial revolution”, that started with semiconductors and gave rise to personal computers, the internet and mobile phones. But perhaps even more important is the effect on electricity networks.

Grids that previously distributed electricity from large central power stations to users are now being re-made to take electricity in from multiple, smaller generators and distribute it much more flexibly: the potential for decentralising control of grids, and for reducing total throughput in line with the fight to prevent dangerous climate change, are substantial.[17]

To sum up: there was no direct causal connection between neoliberal market liberalisation and the expansion of renewable electricity generation in the US. The state and social movements have driven renewables diffusion; now that costs have fallen sharply, large amounts of capital has moved in.

5. The potential benefits of renewable technologies are social: progress in tackling global heating, and more democratic and collectively-controlled energy systems. The labour movement and social movements face struggles to prevent capital from enclosing and appropriating these benefits.

Huber claims that in the US the wind and solar industries “only provide temporary construction jobs” and that, once the installations are built, “the jobs disappear and the only plausible economic benefits besides rents flowing to private landowners are marginal increases in local tax revenues”. This is a narrow view of renewables’ benefits, not only because it is so US-specific, but also because it views “economic benefits” separately from the ecological effects of different types of electricity generation.

The advantage to humanity of renewables expansion – that even under capitalism it creates the potential for closing down coal- and gas-fired power stations and thereby improves the chances of averting disastrous climate change – is not an “economic benefit”, but is still very, very important.

Huber writes that neoliberal electricity restructuring has led to an alliance between big tech firms and other investors and renewable energy producers, to avoid relying on US utilities; that markets in renewable energy certificates are used for greenwashing corporate reputations; that naive environmentalists “have become unwitting allies of the Googles and Berkshire Hathaways of this world”, because they “fail to recognise their renewable advocacy often enables the further neoliberalisation of electricity”; and that the left, “seduced by climate rhetoric”, has “become the unwitting ally of this programme”.

This trail of guilt by association leads nowhere. Yes, there is corporate tension between big tech and the US utilities: the former sees decentralised electricity generation as a way to weaken the latter. Big tech has used new technologies in this way before, for example in the online advertising, transport, and postal industries. But the lesson is not that the internet, the post, or urban transport are bad in and of themselves; rather, it is that society in general and the labour movement specifically must champion public and collective forms of ownership and control.

One does not have to go further than New York to see how this is done: the Public Power NY campaign, whose efforts recently led to the adoption of the Build Public Renewables Act, has won endorsements from unions representing more than 1 million members in the state.[18]

Beyond the US’s borders, we can hear heated discussions among trade unionists across the global south about how to combine social justice goals with the urgent decarbonisation of energy systems.

One starting-point for learning about these is a draft framing document, published last year by Trade Unions for Energy Democracy. Policies that pretend simply to switch from fossil-based energy to renewables are “clearly not viable”, the authors write in their introduction; “the situation demands a policy framework built around public control and ownership of energy, one that can consolidate cooperation and planning”.[19]

In Europe, too, where pro-nuclear French unions are at odds with anti-nuclear unions in other countries, the need for public ownership is at the centre of discussions.

To accuse “the left” of being an “unwitting ally” of big capital does many of these people a tremendous disservice.

6. The claim that renewable power is necessarily inimical to workplace trade union organisation is unfounded.

Huber writes that “the shift away from utilities and towards decentralised merchant generation explicitly undermined the labour unions who had built up their power under the older, established utility system”. He quotes a trade union organiser on the anti-union atmosphere in the “clean tech” industry, and then writes: “It is much easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than scattered solar and wind farms whose [sic], after all, only provide temporary construction jobs.”

The oversimplified message here is: solar and wind are bad for unions, large nuclear and hydro are good for unions (a derivative of the false identifications of “solar and wind, neoliberal” and “nuclear and other centralised power, public” mentioned at the start).

The message is at odds with the facts. The “older established utility system” in the US was broken up in the 1980s. This did indeed damage the unions, with the loss of 150,000 unionised jobs in the 1990s.[20] But the short-lived California “wind boom” played a negligible part, if any, in these events, and the appearance of substantial amounts of renewable electricity generation in the US came at least 20 years later.

As for whether it is easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than in solar and wind farms, I do not know enough about union organisation in the US to say. I do know that the question of organising workers in power generation (i.e. power stations and solar and wind farms) cannot be separated from organising workers in electricity networks, distribution and construction jobs.

Furthermore, the prospects for union organisation are bound up with the fight to extend forms of public ownership in the electricity sector. There is plenty of evidence that renewable electricity generation, and its supply chains, are dominated by companies every bit as rapacious and exploitative as those in the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. But there is also evidence that trade union organising is advancing across the electricity sector, very often hand in hand with political campaigning for public ownership.[21]

The challenges facing trade unions in the electricity sector also need be considered in a wider social and technological context. The “third industrial revolution”, combined with the shift in power away from labour towards capital that we define as neoliberalism, has wrought gigantic changes to the way in which labour is exploited worldwide.

Logistics and supply chains have taken on an unprecedented importance; the internet has changed the way that hundreds and millions of people work and is used by corporations to develop new, more exploitative and very often precarious forms of labour.

Ursula Huws, a leading socialist writer on labour, argued recently that precariousness is the “normal condition of labour under capitalism”, especially outside the rich world and among women in the rich countries. Given the power imbalance between capital and labour, what historians need to explain is how the boom-time rich-world norm of mostly white, mostly male workers in permanent jobs was able to persist for as long as it has.[22]

The changes in the electricity sector are part of this larger picture. It may have been “easier” to organise electricity sector workers 40 years ago than it is now, but to think those conditions can be reproduced now is to deny the way that history happens, and to oppose renewable electricity generation on these grounds is to ignore the general, social interest in its development as a means to deal with climate change.

7. The false identification of renewables with neoliberalism goes hand-in-hand with a false identification of nuclear power with public power. This amounts to a call for socialists to embrace a deeply anti-human technology.

In the very last paragraph of his UnHerd article, Huber writes that “a revived electric public utility system could indeed integrate some renewables in sunny and windy regions (on land and offshore), but grid planners will acknowledge some level of ‘firm’ low-carbon generation like hydroelectric and nuclear power will be required.”

Elsewhere, Huber has argued that nuclear is indispensible. With Fred Stafford he wrote in Catalyst journal that “from a socialist perspective aiming for reliable, nonstop, zerocarbon power, nuclear energy would be the foundation of the grid.” Huber and Stafford set out a vision of “big public power” in which “the public sector would subsidise the mass buildout of large-scale zero-carbon energy generation infrastructure including nuclear power and, where geography suits, renewables”.

An anti-nuclear cartoon from the 1970s. From: Levidow and Young,
 Science, Technology and the Labour Process (1985)
It is important to note that if a grid is moving towards a renewables-dominated approach, planners would hardly select nuclear power as the back-up option, for technological reasons. Unlike e.g. gas or hydro, nuclear power stations’ output can not easily or quickly be switched up and down.[23] The nuclear lobby aims, where it can, to dominate grids in place of renewables; Huber and Stafford are effectively calling on the labour movement to support it.

This would be damaging step backwards.

First, because nuclear power has failed to expand in Europe and the US, despite the fulsome political support given to it since the 1980s; it is extremely expensive and capitalist markets have preferred other solutions.

Second, the progress made by civilian nuclear power can be attributed in large part to its deep and continuing connection with military nuclear power.

Third, not only has the existential danger posed to humanity by the nuclear bomb not disappeared, but the issue of nuclear waste means that nuclear power – despite being a low-carbon form of electricity generation – brings with it serious and unsolved ecological problems.

Nuclear power is the ultimate techno-fix. Huber and Stafford, in arguing in its favour, ignore its frightful history and, in particular, nowhere mention its relationship to the nuclear bomb. Instead of considering its social context, they reproduce some of the nuclear industry’s disingenuous arguments.

To conclude: the identification of neoliberal politics with decentralisation is false (point 1). The liberalisation of the US electricity market in the 1980s was not a decentralising policy, had almost nothing to do with renewables, and was linked to a massive, largely unsuccessful centralised state effort to expand nuclear power (point 2). Socialists who advocated decentralised energy in the 1970s and 80s were not allies of neoliberalism “against society”; on the contrary, their visions of future energy systems were resolutely anti-capitalist (point 3).

The social forces that initially pushed solar and wind technologies were not “neoliberal”: they were the state and social movements, against the background of the “third industrial revolution” that has profound implications for electricity networks (point 4). Renewable electricity generation is not doomed to benefit capital; if we can prise it from capital’s grip, it has great potential benefits to society, including helping to tackle global heating and enhancing democratic control and collective ownership of energy systems (point 5). Union organisation is a different task from 40 years ago, whatever the technologies, and there is no evidence that centralised electricity generation is inherently more amenable either to unions or to public ownership (point 6).

The false logic – renewables equals private, nuclear equals public – is for all these reasons unsustainable. It is deployed as part of a pro-nuclear argument (point 7). Pulling the labour movement behind this anti-human technology would be damaging to socialism.

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♞ Reposted with thanks from Spectre journal.

♞ Wind, water, solar and socialism. A related article from People & Nature.

[1] Variable electricity generation is from resources that stop and start for natural reasons – i.e. because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. Some renewables such as hydro power and modern biofuels are defined as non-variable

[2] Simon Pirani, “Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 2: electricity networks”, People & Nature web site, 15 September 2023

[3] Matt Huber, “Renewable energy’s progressive halo”, UnHerd, 19 May 2023

[4] Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid”, Catalyst 6:4, pages 62-93; Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, “In Defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority”, Jacobin, 4 April 2022

[5] These claims have been addressed elsewhere. On nuclear power, see: Simon Pirani, “Wind, Water, Solar and Socialism. Part 1: energy supply”, People & Nature, September 2023, and Dan Boscov-Ellen, “The Left Goes Nuclear: interview with Joshua Frank”, Spectre, 11 July 2023. On “degrowth”, see: Gareth Dale, “Degrowthers gain support as planet cooks. Can they ally with Green New Dealers?”, TruthOut, 27 August 2023; Timothee Parrique, “A response to Matt Huber: facts and logic in support of degrowth” (a blog post, April 2021); Michael Levien’s on-line review of Huber’s book Climate Change and Class War, and Huber’s response; and essays by Feyzi Ismail and Richard Seymour, a review by Stephen Maher and Joshua McEvoy, and Huber’s response, in the journal Critical Sociology

[6] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), pages 12-19. See also: Damien Cahill and Martijn Konings, Neoliberalism (Polity Press, 2017), especially pages 94-98; and Al Campbell, “The birth of neoliberalism in the US: a reorganisation of capitalism”, in A. Saad-Fihlo and D. Johnston (eds.), Neoliberalism: a critical reader (Pluto Press, 2005), pages 187-192

[7] Brandon Owens, The Wind Power Story: a century of innovation that reshaped the global energy landscape (Wiley/ IEEE Press, 2019), chapters 10, 12 and 13. See also: David Newton, Wind Energy. A reference handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2015), chapters 1 and 2, and Gregory Nemet, How Solar Energy Became Cheap (Routledge, 2019), page 77

[8] Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths (Harper & Row, 1979), chapter 2

[9] Simon Pirani, Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto Press, 2018), page 132; Daniel Pope, Nuclear Implosions: the rise and fall of the Washington public power supply system (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

[10] James Hart and Ullrich Melle, “On Rudolf Bahro”, Democracy and Nature 4, nos. 2-3 (1998)

[11] “Capital’s ‘energy crisis’: Italian analyses”, in: Les Levidow and Bob Young (eds.), Science, Technology and the Labour Process, vol. 2 (Free Association Books, 1985). The quotations are from page 71, from “Energy and the Capitalist Mode of Production” by the Sapere group

[12] Barry Commoner, Making Peace With the Planet (The New Press, 1990), page 193

[13] André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Pluto Press, 1987), page 19

[14] Preben Maegaard, “Towards public ownership and popular acceptance of renewable energy for the common good”, in Preben Maegaard, Anna Krenz and Wolfgang Palz, Wind Power for the World: international reviews and developments (Taylor & Francis, 2013). See also: Lena Neij and Per Dannemand Andersen, “A Comparative Assessment of Wind Turbine Innovation and Diffusion Policies”, in Arnalf Grubler and Charlie Wilson (eds.), Energy Technology Innovation: learning from historical successes and failures (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pages 221-230

[15] See: Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann, Energy Democracy: Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables (Springer, 2016)

[16] European Public Service Unions, Going Public. A decarbonised, affordable and democratic energy system for Europe: the failure of energy liberalisation (EPSU, 2019), page 14

[17] I have written about this in detail in: “Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 2: electricity networks”, People & Nature, September 2023

[18] See the Public Power NY web site, https://publicpowerny.org/about/

[19] TUED, Towards a Public Pathway Approach to a Just Energy Transition for the Global South (December 2022)

[20] Sharon Beder, Power Play: the fight to control the world’s electricity (The New Press, 2003), page 125

[21] The Trade Unions for Energy Democracy web site is a valuable source of information on this.

[22] Ursula Huws, Labour in Contemporary Capitalism: What Next? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), especially pages 51-66

[23] For a lay person’s explanation of this, see David Elliott, Renewable Energy: can it deliver (Polity Press, 2020) pages 77-78

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Realising Renewable Power’s Potential Means Combating Capital

Simon Pirani - ☭ Based on a talk at the Punjab Research Group (UK) conference on “Changing Global Order: Nations and States”, on 28 October.
Here I will, first, comment on the wars in Palestine and Ukraine, and what I think they tell us about 21st century empires. Second, I will offer a view about the causes of these and other wars, and the causes of climate change, all of which can be understood as manifestations of the crisis of capital. Third, I will talk about the relationship of war and social struggles in Russia and Ukraine.

A huge poster for the 2019 Israeli election, at the ruling Likud party’s offices, showed Binyamin
Netanyahu shaking hands with Vladimir Putin. It reads “Another League”. 
Photo by Ilia Yefimovich/dpa/picture alliance

1. Palestine and Ukraine

The initial impetus for the new war in Gaza was the brutal Hamas incursion into Israel that resulted in a shocking number of civilian casualties. But the context is a long history of Israeli settler colonialism: the illegal occupation of Gaza from 1967; the blockade of Gaza since Hamas took control in the elections of 2007; the very high numbers of civilian casualties resulting from this blockade and subsequent Israeli military assaults.

None of this justifies Hamas’s attacks on civilians, but it forms the background to the Israeli military operation, which amounts to collective punishment of the civilian population. The deliberate severing of water and electricity supplies, the order to evacuate northern Gaza, and the heavy bombing of civilian targets are all war crimes.

This murderous onslaught on civilians, justified by nationalist rhetoric, is something that Israel’s war on the Palestinians and Russia’s war on Ukraine have in common. This is what empires do in the 21st century: the western empire that supports Israel, and the weaker Russian empire that the Kremlin is trying to revive.

As the Ukrainian researcher Daria Saburova wrote:

The evil that has killed both Israeli and Palestinian civilians in recent days is rooted in the continued occupation and colonisation by Israel of the Palestinian territories. In this sense, the oppression of the Ukrainian and Palestinian peoples has similarities: it is about the occupation of our lands by states with nuclear weapons and overwhelming military force, which mock the resolutions of the UN and international law, putting their causes above any diplomatic dialogue.

Here in the UK, what jumps out at us is the mind-bending cynicism and hypocrisy of the British political class, many of whom condemn Russian war crimes, but specifically refuse to condemn Israeli war crimes that are horrifically similar.

Over the last three weeks we have also seen a new wave of public frenzy – in the media, in the government and the big political parties – against the Palestinian struggle and anyone who supports it.

Central to this frenzy is the instrumentalisation of national identity and of history in the service of militarism: I mean (1) the false claims by senior Israeli politicians that Israeli policy represents all Jews and that criticism of it is tantamount to antisemitism, and (2) the reference to the holocaust as a justification of Israel’s actions. This twisting of history disrespects Jewish victims of the holocaust, the often helpless targets of an overpowering military machine, by identifying them with the Israeli state.

These Western appeals to national and racial division, and misuse of historical memory, recall the propaganda with which the Russian state defends its assault on Ukrainians.

President Putin and other leading Russian politicians have long denied the legitimacy of Ukraine’s nationhood, language and culture and dismissed Ukraine’s very existence as a historical accident that Russia will now seek to reverse.

The Kremlin’s narrative also appeals to the historical memory of the second world war, falsely identifying Ukrainians with fascism – that is, Ukrainians, millions of whose forefathers died fighting fascism in the 1940s.

There is also a comparison between the concerted drive in Europe and the US to silence pro-Palestinian voices, including pro-Palestinian Jewish voices, on the false grounds that they are antisemitic, and the Russian state’s efforts to silence pro-Ukrainian or even simply anti-war voices, on the grounds that they are supporters of terrorism.

The level of state repression and domestic terror is far, far lower in Europe than in Russia, but the logic of the propaganda is similar.

When we are surrounded by this gigantic mobilisation of lies on all sides, it becomes more important than ever not to limit ourselves to responding to these lies, but to develop our own understanding of the frightening events through which we are living.

This brings me to the two general points that I will make.

First, despite the very different immediate causes of the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, viewed in the context of the crisis of capitalism – of the social system with capital at its centre, in which states and governments serve the interests of capital – fundamentally, their causes are related.

So the short term causes of the war in Gaza include the Netanyahu government’s intensification of apartheid-like measures against the Palestinians, and support for essentially fascist groups of Zionist settlers in sabotaging progress towards peace or Palestinian statehood, all of which has on the Palestinian side strengthened Hamas. But underneath this are longer-term dynamics: the use of Israel by the western powers, over decades, as a bulwark for their interests in seeking to control people and resources in the Middle East.

In Russia’s case, the short-term causes of war included the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism in Russian government and its fear of losing control of Ukraine. But there are underlying causes, to do with how the Russian state has evolved in the post-Soviet period and its relationship with international capital.

Seen in this context, the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion has much in common with movements in the global south that resist imperialism, whether that imperialism takes the form of military action or of economic subjugation.

My second main point is that the causes of these wars and the causes of dangerous climate change are fundamentally related. Both the western and Russian empires are state guardiansof the world economic system that by its nature needs to expand constantly. Capital accumulates, exploits labour, and extracts resources.

On one hand, this endless expansion throws up rivalries that international governance can not control. It leads to wars. On the other, this expansion is increasing endlessly the material throughput of the economy and producing a range of ecological crises, of which the threat of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions is the most serious.

2. The twin dangers of war and climate change

To substantiate these arguments, I will look more closely at the war in Ukraine. To understand its causes, I suggest looking back over the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the way that the relationship of Russian and the western powers changed over that time, and the parallel failure of climate policy.

In the early 1990s, Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states were rapidly integrated in to world markets. They experienced a devastating economic slump. Russia’s importance to the western powers was not only as the centre of a collapsing empire, but as a leading exporter of oil, gas and metals to the world market. Western capital sought to reinforce Russia in that role.

During the 1990s the western powers had feared that the Russian state might collapse. When Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000, those powers welcomed him as someone who could make the state function effectively again. From the start, Putin and his colleagues envisaged some sort of revival of the Russian empire, which was established in the 18th and 19th centuries and aspects of which had been reproduced in the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

Putin’s first act was to crush the separatist movement in the southern republic of Chechnya. The Chechen separatists had defeated the Russian army in 1996; in the second Chechen war in 1999, Putin responded with scorched earth tactics against the civilian population, that are now used in Ukraine.

The western powers fully supported this action, as part of the so-called “war on terror” that they were themselves waging in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Putin also strengthened and centralised the state. He began the assault on democratic rights and independent media that continues today. He turned on the so-called “oligarchs”, the politically-powerful businessmen who had taken control of oil, gas and metals companies and compelled them to pay some taxes. Some assets were taken back into state ownership, and control of them handed to Putin’s former colleagues from the security services.

During Putin’s first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, oil prices rose constantly and the Russian economy boomed. The fall in people’s living standards in the 1990s was reversed.

Russian capital flourished, not because it developed industrial or technological capacities, but thanks to the huge windfall it received from exports of oil, gas and metals. The revenues from these exports was mostly not invested in Russia but re-exported, to the London property market, for example, or to be held as cash in offshore zones. It was and is a parasitic, rather than developmental, form of capitalism.

In the early 2000s, the western powers saw Putin as a gendarme, to protect capital’s interests in the former Soviet space. Russia was welcomed in to the so-called “G7 plus one” of the world’s strongest capitalist powers.

Civilians targeted. Top: a woman outside the hospital in Mariupol, bombed by Russia in March last year. Photo by Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Photo. Above: a man outside a collapsed building in Gaza City, bombed by Israel on 11 October. Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/
It was at this time that NATO expanded in to eastern Europe: seven eastern European countries were admitted in 2004. There were even discussions at that time about Russia joining NATO, although these came to nothing.

In 2007, at the height of the oil boom, in a speech in Munich, Putin denounced the “unipolar world” dominated by the US. Some people saw this as an indication that Russia, along with the other BRICS countries, could be a counterweight to imperialism. But it was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the western powers remained happy for Putin to wield imperial power in the former Soviet space as he saw fit. They turned a blind eye to his invasion of Georgia in 2008.

The world financial and economic crisis of 2008-09 was an important turning point. Russian capital was shaken. Living standards across the former Soviet space stagnated and started to fall again. There were big protest movements in Russia in 2011-12, which Putin’s regime struggled to control.

This social instability culminated in the so-called Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2013-14, the overthrow of president Yanukovich, and Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

At this point, the western powers did intervene, to discipline their gendarme. They were concerned less about Russia’s support for the fascist-like separatist forces in eastern Ukraine than with the annexation of Crimea, that clearly breached international law. Sanctions were imposed on Russia – but they were limited.

These measures did not dissuade the Kremlin from intervening in Syria in 2015-16, to support the Assad regime’s war on its own population. While the western powers’ propaganda pretended there were no “spheres of influence” for competing imperial armies, Syria showed how clearly these were defined. Putin’s regime and its mercenaries were given a free hand there, while the western powers made their own imperial interventions in Afghanistan and Libya.

Only in February 2022, as a result of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, did the western powers abandon their policy of limited cooperation with the Russian government. This was a significant turning point.

Even now, though, the western powers’ policy is to contain and control Russia, but to do so in a manner that ensures that its oil exports, in particular, continue to flow to global markets.

The sanctions imposed on Russian oil have not substantially damaged the government’s ability to finance its onslaught on Ukraine.

So in 2022, world oil prices rose sharply after the invasion. Russia’s earnings from oil sales soared. At the end of 2022, the western nations agreed a price cap on sales of Russian oil of $60/barrel, but it is not effectively policed.

Russian oil is sold to China, India and other nations who refine it and sell the oil products to western nations; a fleet of “shadow” tankers are used to evade sanctions.

The result is that Russia’s total export proceeds have been far higher than average, both last year and this year, the tax take from them has increased, and the Russian treasury is budgeting to spend even more than ever on the military next year, more than $100 billion.

While the western powers are anxious to preserve Russia’s role as a raw materials exporter, they are also happy to undermine its military power, in a way that they were not before February 2022. One result of this has been that Azerbaijan – aware that Russia is unable to intervene while its army is tied down in Ukraine – has been emboldened, with Turkey’s support, to “solve” the dispute with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh by ethnically cleansing the Armenian population.

Now I will argue that there is a connection between these dynamics, which led to war in Ukraine, and the dynamics that have taken us into the climate crisis.

Let us again start in the early 1990s. The international treaty on climate change was signed in Rio in 1992. Scientists had already concluded that the greenhouse effect was dangerous to humanity, and that burning fossil fuels was the main cause: 1992 marked the point at which the evidence was so strong that it was accepted by all the world’s governments.

The treaty provided for action to prevent dangerous global warming, but none was taken. The US and other powers resisted the principle that nations should adopt binding targets to reduce their emissions. The myth was invented, that market mechanisms could be used to make the necessary changes, although the only such mechanism that might have had some effect, a global carbon tax, was rejected. This myth was the basis for the Kyoto protocol of 1997, which provided for so-called emissions trading.

The result was that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion have risen consistently over the three decades since the Rio treaty was signed. The rate at which greenhouse gases are poured into the atmosphere is now more than 60% higher than in 1992.

This is a disastrous failure by the world’s strongest governments, and by the system of international governance set up after the second world war.

A terrible price is already being paid by people across the global south affected by extreme weather conditions, and a still greater price will yet be paid by society as a whole.

What was the political context for this failure? The Rio treaty was signed just after the Soviet Union collapsed. Capital’s illusions about its own power were magnified. In the “roaring nineties”, globalisation was turbo-charged by electronic technology and the expansion of offshore financial zones. Neoliberalism waged war on regulation of the economy.

Both the western-Russian relationship, and the western powers’ approach to climate change, were shaped by this boom, which continued after the brief interruption of the Asian financial crisis of 1998 through the first decade of the 21st century.

In this world, Russia mattered to the western powers as a source of oil, gas and coal. In the economic chaos of the 1990s, these flows were reduced, but during the first two terms of Putin’s presidency, between 2000 and 2008, these fossil fuels poured on to world markets in record quantities. Putin was a guarantor of those flows; the political tension with him was seen as a price worth paying. This calculation only changed in February 2022.

While the western powers pursued their own wars, and allowed Putin to pursue his, they were also fuelling the crisis of excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

They presided over the ineffective combination of voluntary measures and market mechanisms that were proposed to deal with global heating, while each successive report by climate scientists sounded the alarm more desperately.

They presided over the continued flow of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies to the fossil fuel industries. They presided over the distortion of the concept of “net zero”, to pretend that the emissions problem could be solved in future, by fantastical techno-fixes involving sucking huge quantities of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere with unproven technologies.

One false discourse promoted by governments is that the damage done by climate change is not yet real, that it is potential damage in the future. But over the last few years, millions of people, mainly in the global south, have fallen victim to extreme weather events that meteorologists have shown are made far more likely by climate change: those displaced by the floods and droughts in southern Africa in 2019 and 2020, the floods in Pakistan last year, and this year the extreme heat in India.

The false discourses around climate change remind me of the mountain of lies about wars. When the imperial powers’ politicians turn truth on its head, and tell Palestinian victims of Israeli violence that they are trying to help them, we can hear echoes of their rhetoric about climate change that has facilitated more decades of fossil-fuelled economic expansion.

This political elite facilitates the processes of capital accumulation and constant economic expansion that characterise 21st century capitalism and underpin imperialism. Look at the reaction of the world’s leading governments to the two crises that have interrupted economic expansion in the last two decades – the financial and economic crisis of 2008-09, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Both times, the growth of fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions was temporarily halted. But in both cases, hundreds of billions of dollars were rapidly mobilised to renew that expansion.

Are states and governments, and international governance structures such as the UN, unwilling, or unable, to control the monstrous chaos of capitalist expansion? No doubt there is a complicated combination. What is sure is that they do not do so.

For all these reasons, I argue that the underlying causes of wars and of the climate crisis are related.

3. Russia and Ukraine

Now I want to argue that the causes of war lie not only in the tensions between imperial powers and other nations, but also in the tensions between states and societies. What society does counts: class struggles, movements for democracy, for women’s rights, around ecological issues, and so on. Ultimately, war is a means of social control. It is related to and combines with forms of state repression of social movements.

Here are three points about Russia’s war in Ukraine, to support this argument.

The first is about social movements. I have already mentioned the 2008-09 economic and financial crisis, the social dislocation that it caused across the former Soviet Union, and the discontent and social movements that followed, in Russia itself and in Ukraine.

In Ukraine in 2014, these culminated in the chaotic and politically heterogenous Maidan uprising that overthrew the Yanukovich government.

The events in eastern Ukraine at this time deserve comment. The Party of Regions, of which Yanukovich was the head and which was the largest party in parliament, was formed and financed by eastern Ukraine’s industrial capitalists.

This party sought to deepen the divisions between the eastern areas, where there is a high proportion of Russian speakers, and central and western Ukraine. They were helped not only by the crude nationalism of some politicians in Kyiv, but also by the Kremlin, which saw Yanukovich as an ally.

There was some social support for regional autonomy in eastern Ukraine, and the Party of Regions amplified it. But only the right-wing armed militia, who went on to form the so-called “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, advocated separation.

The Russian military intervention in Ukraine began in 2014, in support of these republics. The Kremlin saw these as a means to undermine the Ukrainian state that was moving out of its orbit towards the European Union.

And the effect on the local population was devastating: the economy was wrecked; many of the large coal mines, processing plants and steel works closed, and thousands of jobs were lost. The population of the area shrank by half, with millions of people being displaced either to Ukraine or Russia.

Why did this conflict not only drag on, but give way to the all-out Russian invasion last year? Again, social change across the former Soviet space has to be taken into account.

In 2020 there was a huge national revolt against the fixing of elections in Belarus, and in 2020 and 2021 an upsurge of protest in Russia itself. In January 2022 labour disputes and street disturbances shook the government of Kazakhstan.

On the political level, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has been attributed to his failure to push back president Zelensky on issues of Ukrainian sovereignty. Zelensky, who had been elected in 2019, with peace as a key point in his platform, refused to concede territory in order to achieve it. But this breakdown of diplomacy coincided with the social movements I mentioned, and these were key factors that forced the Kremlin’s hand.

Not only was the drive to control civil society a cause of the invasion, but action by civil society in resisting the Russian army was a key reason for its failure.

The second point is that in times of crisis, states are driven along the road of authoritarianism, and the promotion of nationalist, xenophobic and fascist ideologies. The Russian elite has provided an example of this, with open calls to annihilate Ukraine. These are political and ideological tools of social control; they are used to mobilise sections of the population behind the regime, or at least to secure the acquiescence of the population.

The third point is that the use of these ideological tools cuts across the state’s functions of economic management. In 2014, and again in 2022, Putin’s government sacrificed management of the economy for the sake of politics and ideology. In 2014 the Kremlin saw western sanctions, the resulting lack of credit for Russian companies and economic stagnation, as prices worth paying for its military intervention in Ukraine.

In 2022, this went even further. Not only did Russian business face the sanctions on oil exports and financial transactions, but also the Kremlin also decided itself to wreck the Russian gas trade with Europe that had been built up over decades by the state-owned gas company, Gazprom. The economy was sacrificed, subordinated to the requirements of military expansion.

Finally I will touch on the relationship between the Russian and Indian governments. This is far from my fields of research, but I have learned from arguments made by the Marxist feminist writer Kavita Krishnan, who last year resigned from leading bodies of the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation, stating that it had failed robustly to oppose Russian imperialism. I will highlight three points that Krishnan has made about the Russian war.

First, she says that the political relationships between Russia, India and China, while publicly presented as challenging “western elites”, are based both on common economic interests and also on a common hostility to democracy and free speech, to women’s rights and to progressive social policies.

In India, right wing politicians portray this Russia-India-China axis as “multipolarity”. Krishnan argues that, to these politicians, this is actually a by-word for opposition to human rights and democratic rights. In an interview with the Ukrainian socialist journal Commons, Krishnan said:

These authoritarian and bigoted leaders are forging an ideological alliance to argue for a ‘multipolar world’, by which they mean that fascist and authoritarian regimes should be able to define ‘democracy’ as majoritarianism. So they say: ‘Who are the western elites to tell us that we must count undocumented immigrants, religious or ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ+ persons as rights-bearing citizens? These ideas are anathema to our civilisation values.’ This is the basis on which Putin says Ukrainians can live only if they agree to call themselves Russian; Xi says Muslims in China must be ‘Chinese’ in character; and Modi says Muslims in India must accept Hindu supremacy.

Second, Krishnan sees an ideological alliance between the Russian nationalist right that influences the Kremlin, and the extreme right wing of Hindu nationalism. She points to the Russian fascist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, who has theorised the idea of “multipolarity”. He maintains links with extreme right-wing Indian organisations and derides liberal democracy by using the Hindu term Kali Yuga, which is anathema to the Indian right.

Third, Krishnan questions trends in left political parties who see the world principally in terms of a tension between western imperialism and the supposed anti-imperialism of Russia, India, China and other non-western powers. This she criticises as a revival of the campism that hobbled the labour movement politically when the Soviet Union still existed and denies agency to the labour movement and social movements. I agree with that criticism.

Conclusions

First, the wars of Israel against the Palestinians, and of Russia against Ukraine, both waged with murderous attacks on civilians, are not aberrations but are characteristic of 21st century imperialism. The alliance of western powers, which can be called an empire, supports Israel; it also oversees the economic subjugation of the global south. Russia, although weakened, is an empire that its elite are seeking to revive.

Second, the causes of these wars, and of climate change, are both rooted in the crisis of capital, that by its nature needs constantly to accumulate and to drive economic expansion. The capitalist states and their international institutions have presided over decades of fossil-fuelled economic expansion that have produced the crisis of excessive greenhouse gas emissions and the threats that it carries for humanity.

Third, none of these things can be understood just in terms of states, their rivalries and their relations with capital. Society matters. In the case of Ukraine, Russia’s invasion was above all a response to social movements that the Kremlin feared and could not control. Ukrainian society, too, has played a central part in resisting the invasion.

Fourth and finally, in my view, ways to resist empire, to resist war and to tackle dangerous climate change must be found by society, acting independently of and against capitalist states and the political elites associated with them.

🔴With thanks to the Punjab Research Group (UK), who warmly welcomed me to Saturday’s conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I gave this talk; to professor Pritam Singh, who arranged it; and to the many conference participants who joined our discussion.

🔴Palestine and Israel: historical, legal and moral issues, by Rohini Hensman (The India Forum, 24 October)

🔴 Some of these issues will no doubt be discussed at the Dialogue of the Peripheries on-line conference, organised by the Ukrainian journal Commons, this weekend.

🔴 Earlier People & Nature articles attempting to analyse the Ukraine war in a global context are here, here and here.

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Palestine And Ukraine 💣 How The 21st Century Empires Wage War

People And Nature ☭ “An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time”, the socialist historian Howard Zinn wrote in September 2004.

Simon Pirani

 In an essay in The Nation, he continued:


To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.
Howard Zinn.
Photo from Zinn Education Project

In the essay, “The Optimism of Uncertainty” (on open access), Zinn questioned the “tendency to think that “what we see in the present moment” will continue.

We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

He recounted the twists and turns of twentieth century history from the February revolution in Russia in 1917, the “bizarre shifts” of world war two, the “disintegration of the old Western empires” so quickly after it ended, the rapprochement between the Chinese Communist Party and imperialism, and so on. And argued:

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervour, determination, unity, organisation, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience – whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) wrote the ground-breaking People’s History of the United States, that focused on the struggle of native Americans against colonisation, slaves against slavery, and workers against employers. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam war in the 1970s, and described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.”

Zinn wrote “The Optimism of Uncertainty” nearly two decades ago, during the barbaric counter-insurgency operation in Iraq, conducted by the US and UK forces that invaded the country in 2003. The battle for Fallujah, in which those forces levied a terrible toll on civilians, was raging.

His words seem relevant now, during the Israeli military operation in Gaza, and I have been sharing them with friends who have, like me, been shocked at the sheer brutality of the war crimes being committed daily with the full support of western governments.

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‘If We See Only The Worst, It Destroys Our Capacity To Act’

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