As I sat in the lobby of my building, a worker who was installing a new entry system noticed the book I was reading, which dealt with climate change, and made a comment that prompted a major discussion.
He made it clear that he understood the dire threat posed by global heating and was very bitter about the destructive course being set by the fossil fuel industry. He also had scathing things to say about political leaders who are enabling a planetary disaster. Where I took issue with him was with his verdict. He was fully convinced that we are, as he put it, “fucked.” Not only had he decided that climate change has advanced to the point where it is too late to prevent utter catastrophe, but he also held that Big Oil and its political enablers are so powerful that effective resistance is impossible. The notion that we can mobilize, resist, and create alternatives was almost completely alien to his thinking.
Pondering over the significance of our little chat, it struck me that the fatalistic view of this particular worker speaks to both the immediate issue of challenging climate-wrecking capitalism as well as offering an object lesson in a key form of ideological containment that impedes both the development of rebellious thinking and movements of resistance.
Climate crossroads
Admittedly, no one can definitively refute the claim that climate change may already have advanced to the point where it will only be possible to mitigate the unfolding global catastrophe.
Last year, the UN Climate Programme took stock of the fact that the goal of containing global warming at 1.5°C was not being met. It noted,
Even if countries live up to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and that’s a big “if”—the world will warm by 2.3°C to 2.5°C by the end of the century [which is] more than enough to destabilize delicate climate systems, leading to a surge in droughts, floods, superstorms and other extreme weather.
At the very least, the dire impacts we are experiencing will go on intensifying and pose huge challenges for human societies across the world. There is also the possibility of climate change accelerating as tipping points are triggered. Given the conduct of the fossil fuel companies and their political enablers, we can readily appreciate that even the disastrous 2.5C ceiling will be breached if they are left to their own devices.
Even in an historically privileged country like Canada, the effects of climate change are already altering our lives. Whether we must flee wildfires that threaten our homes or breathe in the toxic air hundreds of miles away, it is clear that there is no going back. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, and brutal winter storms will threaten our employment, undermine our working conditions, and destabilize the communities we live in.
In the face of this escalating threat, the political establishment is united behind plans to greatly expand fossil fuel production. As he does all he can to advance destructive projects and build pipelines, Mark Carney has declared that even the most modest emission targets won’t be met. As reported by CTV News, he has decided that such environmental protections are “too divisive” and constitute “an open opportunity for those people who wish to pull Canada apart, both at home and from abroad.”
The destructive climate course we are on is not a fixed one, however. A timely coordinated international effort to curtail carbon emissions and a shift to sustainable forms of economic activity, which necessarily involves a harmonious relationship between human societies and the rest of the natural world, offers the possibility of preventing the 4°C heating that we are presently on course to reaching.
The gargantuan stumbling block here is capitalism, which offers no possibility of maintaining conditions that are compatible with the preservation of human civilization. On the contrary, as long as capitalism reigns supreme we will face the intensifying impacts of global heating on the most unfavourable terms possible. An exploitative system of extraction and production and an imperialist world order spell social abandonment, brutal repression, armed conflicts, the growth of reactionary movements, and rampant political instability. They augur the decimation of human populations and of other species we share the planet with.
Given that we can’t get rid of capitalism at this stage, the degree to which we fight for climate justice, and the ways in which we do so, will determine the extent to which we can limit the heating process and ensure that the protections and capacities to survive that we must have are in place even before we have been able to settle accounts with our class enemies.
We are going to have to generate an active solidarity for survival in the years ahead to ensure that the impacts of climate change aren’t left to play out along the fault lines of social, racial, and global inequality.
In the period we have now entered, the imperative isn’t only to limit emissions and win measures of transition to sustainability; we must ensure that working-class populations, small farmers and the poor, especially in the Global South, are protected in the face of the intensifying impacts of global heating.
At home, we must fight austerity-focused governments determined to avoid investing in the social protections that the impacts of climate change make absolutely essential.
The conclusion that nothing can be done is unwarranted and stems from the distortions of the dominant ideology that contends there is no alternative to moving full throttle toward an uninhabitable planet.
Defying despair
The sense of hopelessness generated by the scale and unimpeded advance of global heating as reflected by my interlocutor in my lobby extends to other challenges that we must reckon with. Those orchestrating climate catastrophe are also gutting public services, vastly increasing military spending, attacking immigrants, and undermining Indigenous rights. We need to challenge our enemies on a broad front and, to do this, we must eschew the notion that they are invincible.
My brief encounter with this man and his determination to embrace pessimism also pointed to a broader issue around working-class consciousness. As I always point out in the “Fighting to Win” course that I facilitate, this society is a battlefield in which the dominant ideas of the ruling class are confronted by oppositional thinking that is being constantly generated by the exploitative realities of life. My fellow worker in the lobby is a case in point. He knows the corporate climate deniers are deluded and he understands that they are leading us towards a global catastrophe. Yet he sees their power and control as an insurmountable reality.
In the realm of ideas, this form of thinking is the greatest factor in blocking the path to struggle and resistance. A bleak sense of fatalism, hovering on the edge of despair, is a regrettable but very powerful part of working-class life. It contains both the seeds of rebellion and the embittered conclusions that generate submission.
The means of breaking out of this factor of containment won’t, for the most part, be found in reasoned argument, as my conversation with this worker unfortunately demonstrated. Nor will it be produced simply by experiencing hardship and injustice. The antidote to this form of passivity is active struggle. In these exceptional times, the leap in thinking that is required can only be achieved by massive strikes, sweeping mobilization, and the posing of clear political alternatives.
Outpourings of anger need to be supported by more enduring organizational forms. In order to sustain our struggles, we must build movements that are dynamic, democratic, and participatory. That means rooting them in workplaces and communities and developing the forms of organization that can fight back at the local level while merging with a country-wide working-class common front of resistance.
When those movements take to the streets, I have no doubt that the worker I spoke to today will be in the thick of things, jettisoning his belief that nothing can change in favour of a burning conviction that everything must change.