Naomi Klein’s most recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) comes at a time when the discussion of climate change and its impacts is constant and growing. Capitalists come together to make phony promises to reduce carbon emissions and slow the climate shifts while perpetuating the myth that individual workers are responsible for the condition of the planet.
Klein’s book has become something of a “bible” for the movement against anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW). Klein appears to attack the economic system as a whole. It’s a well-written book, but at the same time a very bad book—good on describing the problem but bad on providing a real solution.
Klein makes some good points: she describes the consequences of AGW, including extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, heat waves, and sea level rise, and she explains why poor Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers of the world are hurt the most. Klein explained that burning coal, oil, and natural gas is currently the main cause of AGW and that huge corporations (e.g., ExxonMobil) profit while the rest of us suffer the consequences. She relates AGW to surface features of capitalism, including, perhaps the most useful, how the laws passed to facilitate global world trade directly prevent any government from lessening AGW.
Capitalism Fuels Global Warming
Among solutions, Klein promotes mass organization as the way to fight AGW by trying to force all governments to end AGW and lessen its devastations. But the mass organizing she proposes is to reform capitalism, implying that capitalism could be made to be more environmentally friendly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism, by its very nature will always put the ruling class’s profit and power over the long-term health and wellbeing of the planet and the working class.
It is because of the super-exploitation, lacking healthcare, profit-driven utilities, extreme homelessness, and horrendous living conditions that capitalism forces our working class brothers and sisters into that the devastating effects of climate change will always fall most extremely on the working class.
In India, an extreme heatwave in 2015 left at least 2,500 of the poorest members of the working class dead.
Drought and rising temperatures across southern and eastern Africa leave the working class there vulnerable, with nearly 16 million people already going hungry and “more than 40 million rural and 9 million poor urban people at risk [of going hungry]” (The Guardian, 3/16).
In Ethiopia in particular, it is predicted that 2 million children will need to be treated for malnutrition, 10 million people will need food aid, and 3.9 million children will have their education interrupted (Guardian, 3/16).
These attacks are part and parcel of capitalism—no amount of laws or reforms will change the exploitative and deadly essence. And this is how the book fails. First, Klein mistakes the appearance of capitalism for its true essence. She attacks deregulated free-market capitalism, advocating a change in the form of the system, in which government intervention force fossil fuel companies to shut down.
Only communist revolution is a solution, in fact the only solution, to AGW. A world run by the working class would make wholesale shifts in production, prioritizing the needs of the working class and the need for a healthy planet.
Under capitalism, the main ideology—the ideas that are allowed to grow and spread—are limited to the ones that do not threaten the capitalists’ position. Those that do threaten, such as the idea that the world’s workers need revolution and communism, are outlawed and repressed. Klein repeatedly says that if only the government and corporations would shed their belief in free-market and other aspects of capitalist ideology, we could solve the problem. She ignores the source of these ideas and that they are critical to the ruling class maintaining profit.
A serious weakness of Klein’s analysis, and those of other liberal misleaders is the belief that the right politicians can be convinced or pressured to force the big corporations to get in line. This is not how capitalism works. The state (the government) is the instrument of outlawing and repression, through legislatures, cops, courts, prisons, and the military.
Contrary to Klein’s misleading analysis, the bosses maintain power through the state. Legislation and courts function in their interest. She does correctly point out that mass movements have occasionally extracted concessions from the state and its rulers—concessions that are always temporary and are often followed by increased repression of the working class (for example, the use of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration to attack the working class in response to the Black-led worker rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s). But these occasional concessions lead her to conclude that sheer numbers enable us to use the state against the capitalists.
The reality is that neither persuasion nor voting majorities count. The state embodies sheer force and violence to protect the class interests of the rulers. It cannot be turned to our use against the rulers, but rather requires our gathering sufficient unity and numbers to physically overpower and demolish the capitalist state, and construct in its place a worker-controlled state with a completely different form of organization—communism!
For the world’s working class to end AGW and to improve our position permanently, it requires us to engage in armed revolution. Mass movements within the confines of capitalist rules and laws are relatively impotent. Yes, let us organize within these mass organizations—for communist politics.
Capitalism, its rulers, and their state must be abolished for the working class to win any permanent gains—including the abolition of capitalist-fostered racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Communist philosophy provides the only guidelines to evaluate the real world and arrive at valid answers. Klein raises many useful ideas as to the science of what needs to be done to stop AGW, but misses the point entirely about how to bring these ideas to fruition—not just a change of form, but the overthrow of capitalism altogether, and the development of a worker-run communist society.