This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate is a must-read
guide to the climate justice movement. It summarizes the science of climate
change, the extractivist industries driving it, the system to which they are
connected, and the growing resistance. Through her dynamic style, Naomi Klein
describes the changes in the climate, the changes in the movement, and inspires
us to change ourselves as well—just as her own politics have changed.
Climate change
This Changes Everything warns of the severe consequences of climate
change, the industries (like tar sands, fracking, and mountain top removal) that
are pushing us to the precipice, and the racism and profiteering that accompany
it. Klein shows that the proposed capitalist solutions—from industries like
nuclear power, market schemes like carbon offsets, technology like
geoengineering, or faith in the 1%—only compound the problem. As she explains,
“The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis
created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that
has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory
aside and take a hard look at the results.”
Faced with a capitalist climate change, she debunks
simplistic solutions—whether it’s calling for individual lifestyle changes
while ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that constrain choice, claiming
there aren’t enough resources while billions have gone to corporate bailouts,
or blaming China and India while ignoring Western corporations profiting from
the exploitation of their workers. This is not only a critique of the system
that produces climate change but of the record of the mainstream environmental
movement in challenging it. Klein outlines the coopting of the earlier
environmental movement, “what had been a rabble of hippies became a movement of
lawyers, lobbyists, and UN summit hoppers” who presented climate change “as a
narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market
system.”
The failure of mainstream
environmentalism has eliminated gradual and incremental options: “We are left
with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our
world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.
But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no
gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” This Changes Everything is an urgent call for mass action,
connecting the increasing climate disasters to the radical transformation
needed to stop them. As Klein explains in her poetic style, climate change is
“a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of
fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely
new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”
Movement change
This Changes Everything profiles the rising climate justice
movements, introducing readers to campaigns and activists around the world, and
showing concrete and inspiring examples of how people are organizing. “All of
this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I had had to race to
keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but
resistance is beginning to boil.”
Klein profiles the indigenous
communities leading the climate justice movement, from the Ogoni people in
Nigeria to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation at ground zero of the tar sands.
Contrasting the lack of solidarity to the Mi’kmaq blockade at Burnt Church 15
years ago with the broad support for the Mi’kmaq blockade at Elsipogtog last
year, she describes the sea change that the movement is producing: “The
movements against extreme energy extraction are becoming more than just battles
against specific oil, gas, an coal companies and more, even, than pro-democracy
movements. They are opening up spaces for a historical reconciliation between
Indigenous peoples and non-Natives, who are finally understanding that, at a
time when elected officials have open disdain for basic democratic principles,
Indigenous rights are not a threat, but a tremendous gift.”
Arguing that “exploited workers
and an exploited planet are, it turn out, a package deal,” Klein shares lessons
from the Northern Cheyenne in building community-run solar panels, and explains
how that the technology for renewables exists and provides an alternative both
for front-line Indigenous communities defending their land and for
non-Indigenous workers needing jobs: “Manufacturing in North America is as
battered as family farming, which means that well-paying union jobs are so
scarce that people will fight for whatever jobs are on offer, no matter how
dangerous, precarious, or polluting to themselves, their families, or their
communities. The solution, as the more visionary sectors of the labor movement
understand, is to fight for policies that do not force workers to make those
kinds of choices…Today’s climate movement does not have the luxury of simply
saying no without simultaneously fighting for a series of transformative
yeses—the building blocks of our next economy that can provide good clean jobs,
as well as a social safety net that cushions the hardships for those inevitably
suffering losses…There is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil
fuels than the creation of real alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind
of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one.”
As a great theorist for the
movements, Naomi Klein has both influenced and been influenced by them. This Changes Everything represents
another change in Naomi Klein’s own politics, that have shaped and been shaped
by movements against corporate globalization, war and climate change.
From brand bullies to state bullies
In No Logo she explained the rise of multinationals as the result of a
marketing idea in the 1980s, and wrote that the “virtual brick and mortar” of
branding was replacing production. Taking aim at the “brand bullies” she praised
a resistance “both focused and fragmented” that could subvert and hold the
multinationals accountable by culture jamming and reclaiming the streets. Released
in the wake of the 2001 Seattle protest against the WTO, No Logo reflected the emerging anti-globalization movement and
provided activists with a global framework to understand corporations and the
diverse threats they pose. But it left open the role of the state.
The Iraq War of 2003 and the historic
movement against it showed that corporate profits don’t just derive from
marketing strategies but from state violence—whether it’s to steal Iraq’s oil
or profit from disasters in New Orleans. The
Shock Doctrine reflected this radicalization and deepened it. As Naomi
Klein wrote, “Most of us chose to oppose the way as an act of folly by a
president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted
to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea
that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had
unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed
economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was
proportional to what was at stake.”
The Shock Doctrine was released in 2007 just at the time of the economic
crisis, and armed activists to confront the resulting austerity. As the
moderator introducing her at the Climate Convergence last week explained, Chicago
teachers had reading groups of her book during their successful strike.
Whereas the word “capitalism” did
not even make the index of No Logo,
it was on the front cover and throughout The
Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But it was not capitalism
itself that was the problem, but a particular “fundamentalist” “unfettered” and
“deregulated” version. Rather than a bad marketing idea of the 1980s, Klein
located the problem decades prior in Milton Friedman’s economic theories that
led a “50 year campaign for total corporate liberation.” As she wrote, “I am
not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent…A free
market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with
public schools, with a large segment of the economy—like a national oil
company—held in state hands…Markets need not be fundamentalist… Keynes proposed
exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy…that system of compromises,
checks and balances.”
From disaster capitalism to capitalist disasters
The climate science and the
indigenous-led climate justice movement have led to another exciting shift in
politics. As she wrote in the introduction of This Changes Everything, “this is the hardest book I have ever
written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical
responses.” Her search encourages us to do the same. Now the problem is not years of marketing or decades of
neoliberalism but centuries of colonialism and capitalism: “the things we must do to
avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular
strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in
conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model:
grow or die.”
Rather than defending state-owned
oil companies, she argues: “These have never been safe or low-risk industries.
Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable
part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole
subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their
poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.”
As a result, she takes on the
record of the “extractivist left” who have tried to make change without
fighting for climate justice—including trade unions “trying to freeze in place
the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members
deserve,” centre-left Keynesians obsessed with GDP growth regardless of how
it’s achieved, the former Soviet Union whose environmental record was just as
bad as the capitalists, the Latin American government who have reduced economic
inequality but not ecological injustice, and Greece’s left alternative Syriza
that counterposed the environment with economic recovery.
Rather than calling for compromises, Naomi Klein denounces
the “fetish of centrism” in the face of climate catastrophe: “What the
‘moderates’ constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more
palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people
responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they
ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomanical elite that they are
still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the
contrary? The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on
your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible.”
Strategic debates
Shifting from subverting brands to calling for a climate
revolution leads to a shift in strategy: “I have, in the past, strongly
defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures—whether
that means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic
demands…As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the
rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s
transformative movements can afford…Despite endless griping, tweeting, flash
mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and
sustained the transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are
disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive
political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service
organizations—are fighting for their lives.”
There’s also the question of the ultimate aim of this fight.
If the climate crisis is rooted in centuries of colonialism and capitalism,
then we need to replace the corporations and states responsible. But while This Change Everything leads us in that
direction, it constantly returns to the theme of The Shock Doctrine: that the problem is not capitalism itself but the
“reigning ideology” of “market fundamentalism,” created by the “free market
counterrevolution” that has “infiltrated virtually every government” and “binds
the imagination of our elites.” This makes it seem like neoliberalism is a
conspiratorial highjacking of a system that could otherwise be sustainable,
leading to nostalgia for the Keynesianism of the 1930s and social programs
after WWII.
But Keynesianism failed to solve the Great Depression, which
only disappeared through the barbarism of WWII and a permanent arms economy
that temporarily sustained a capitalist boom. This allowed states to develop health
and education both under pressure from social movements but also in order to
compete with other capitalist rivals. The re-emergence of economic crisis led
to neoliberal ideology—not the other way around—and the limitations of its
“corporate liberation strategy” was made clear when decades of deregulation and
financialization failed to prevent the worst (and ongoing) economic crisis
since the Great Depression. Economic crisis and war (whose ecological impacts
are hardly mentioned) are both intrinsic features of capitalism, whether
Keynesian or neoliberal. But because the democratic and revolutionary waves
that ended WWI and inspired the world were first crushed and then buried in
history, the only answer to her question “has an economic shift of this kind
ever happened before in history?” is some reformist version of capitalism.
This Changes
Everything does not quite change everything. But released in the context of
400,000
marching for climate justice—along with thousands of actions across the
world—it reflects and advances the hope that this new movement can change
everything: “The climate movement offers an overarching narrative in which
everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations
for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the
grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.”
