by Naomi Klein
Because the carbon record doesn’t lie. And what that record tells us is that emissions are still rising: every year we release more greenhouse gases than the year before, the growth rate increasing from one decade to the next—gases that will trap heat for generations to come, creating a world that is hotter, colder, wetter, thirstier, hungrier, angrier. So if there is any hope of reversing these trends, glimpses won’t cut it; we will need the climate revolution playing on repeat, all day every day, everywhere.
Werner was right to point out that mass resistance movements have grabbed the wheel before and could very well do so again. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that lowering global emissions in line with climate scientists’ urgent warnings demands changes of a truly daunting speed and scale. Meeting science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.7 It will also require coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of road maps.
The crucial question we are left with, then, is this: has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history? We know it can happen during wartime, when presidents and prime ministers are the ones commanding the transformation from above. But has it ever been demanded from below, by regular people, when leaders have wholly abdicated their responsibilities? Having combed through the history of social movements in search of precedents, I must report that the answer to that question is predictably complex, filled with “sort ofs” and “almosts”—but also at least one “yes.”
In the West, the most common precedents invoked to show that social movements really can be a disruptive historical force are the celebrated human rights movements of the past century—most prominently, civil, women’s, and gay and lesbian rights. And these movements unquestionably transformed the face and texture of the dominant culture. But given that the challenge for the climate movement hinges on pulling off a profound and radical economic transformation, it must be noted that for these movements, the legal and cultural battles were always more successful than the economic ones.
The U.S. civil rights movement, for instance, fought not only against legalized segregation and discrimination but also for massive investments in schools and jobs programs that would close the economic gap between blacks and whites once and for all. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that, “The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. . . . The real cost lies ahead. . . . The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”8
And though often forgotten, the more radical wing of the second-wave feminist movement also argued for fundamental challenges to the free market economic order. It wanted women not only to get equal pay for equal work in traditional jobs but to have their work in the home caring for children and the elderly recognized and compensated as a massive unacknowledged market subsidy—essentially a demand for wealth redistribution on a scale greater than the New Deal.
But as we know, while these movements won huge battles against institutional discrimination, the victories that remained elusive were those that, in King’s words, could not be purchased “at bargain rates.” There would be no massive investments in jobs, schools, and decent homes for African Americans, just as the 1970s women’s movement would not win its demand for “wages for housework” (indeed paid maternity leave remains a battle in large parts of the world). Sharing legal status is one thing; sharing resources quite another.
If there is an exception to this rule it is the huge gains won by the labor movement in the aftermath of the Great Depression—the massive wave of unionization that forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers, which in turn helped create a context to demand ambitious social programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance (programs from which the majority of African American and many women workers were notably excluded). And in response to the market crash of 1929, tough new rules regulating the financial sector were introduced at real cost to unfettered profit making. In the same period, social movement pressure created the conditions for the New Deal and programs like it across the industrialized world. These made massive investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation systems, housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today.
If the search for historical precedents is extended more globally (an impossibly large task in this context, but worth a try), then the lessons are similarly mixed. Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’état before reaching their potential. Indeed postcolonial independence movements—which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions—were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).
Even the stunningly successful battle against apartheid in South Africa suffered its most significant losses on the economic equality front. The country’s freedom fighters were not, it is worth remembering, only demanding the right to vote and move freely. They were also, as the African National Congress’s official policy platform, the Freedom Charter, made clear, struggling for key sectors of the economy—including the mines and the banks—to be nationalized, with their proceeds used to pay for the social programs that would lift millions in the townships out of poverty. Black South Africans won their core legal and electoral battles, but the wealth accumulated under apartheid remained intact, with poverty deepening significantly in the post-apartheid era.9
There have been social movements, however, that have succeeded in challenging entrenched wealth in ways that are comparable to what today’s movements must provoke if we are to avert climate catastrophe. These are the movements for the abolition of slavery and for Third World independence from colonial powers. Both of these transformative movements forced ruling elites to relinquish practices that were still extraordinarily profitable, much as fossil fuel extraction is today.
The movement for the abolition of slavery in particular shows us that a transition as large as the one confronting us today has happened before—and indeed it is remembered as one of the greatest moments in human history. The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction, as several historians and commentators have observed. Journalist and broadcaster Chris Hayes, in an award-winning 2014 essay titled “The New Abolitionism,” pointed out “the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth” and concluded that “it is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.”10
There is no question that for a large sector of the ruling class at the time, losing the legal right to exploit men and women in bondage represented a major economic blow, one as huge as the one players ranging from Exxon to Richard Branson
would have to take today. As the historian Greg Grandin has put it, “In the realm of economics, the importance of slaves went well beyond the wealth generated from their uncompensated labor. Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.” In the eighteenth century, Caribbean sugar plantations, which were wholly dependent on slave labor, were by far the most profitable outposts of the British Empire, generating revenues that far outstripped the other colonies. In Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild quotes enthusiastic slave traders describing the buying and selling of humans as “the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves” and “the foundation of our commerce . . . and first cause of our national industry and riches.”11
While not equivalent, the dependency of the U.S. economy on slave labor—particularly in the Southern states—is certainly comparable to the modern global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels.I According to historian Eric Foner, at the start of the Civil War, “slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together.” Strengthening the parallel with fossil fuels, Hayes points out that “in 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire [United States], which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.” That figure is very roughly similar to the value of the carbon reserves that must be left in the ground worldwide if we are to have a good chance of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.12
But the analogy, as all acknowledge, is far from perfect. Burning fossil fuels is of course not the moral equivalent of owning slaves or occupying countries. (Though heading an oil company that actively sabotages climate science, lobbies aggressively against emission controls while laying claim to enough interred carbon to drown populous nations like Bangladesh and boil sub-Saharan Africa is indeed a heinous moral crime.) Nor were the movements that ended slavery and defeated colonial rule in any way bloodless: nonviolent tactics like boycotts and protests played major roles, but slavery in the Caribbean was only outlawed after numerous slave rebellions were brutally suppressed, and, of course, abolition in the United States came only after the carnage of the Civil War.
Another problem with the analogy is that, though the liberation of millions of slaves in this period—some 800,000 in the British colonies and four million in the U.S.—represents the greatest human rights victory of its time (or, arguably, any time), the economic side of the struggle was far less successful. Local and international elites often managed to extract steep payoffs to compensate themselves for their “losses” of human property, while offering little or nothing to former slaves. Washington broke its promise, made near the end of the Civil War, to grant freed slaves ownership of large swaths of land in the U.S. South (a pledge known colloquially as “40 acres and a mule”). Instead the lands were returned to former slave owners, who proceeded to staff them through the indentured servitude of sharecropping. Britain, as discussed, awarded massive paydays to its slave owners at the time of abolition. And France, most shockingly, sent a flotilla of warships to demand that the newly liberated nation of Haiti pay a huge sum to the French crown for the loss of its bonded workforce—or face attack.13 Reparations, but in reverse.
The costs of these, and so many other gruesomely unjust extortions, are still being paid in lives, from Haiti to Mozambique. The reverse-reparations saddled newly liberated nations and people with odious debts that deprived them of true independence while helping to accelerate Europe’s Industrial Revolution, the extreme profitability of which most certainly cushioned the economic blow of abolition. In sharp contrast, a real end to the fossil fuel age offers no equivalent consolation prizes to the major players in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Solar and wind can make money, sure. But by nature of their decentralization, they will never supply the kind of concentrated super-profits to which the fossil fuel titans have become all too accustomed. In other words, if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real—not only because of the carbon left in the ground but also because of the regulations, taxes, and social programs needed to make the required transformation. Indeed, these new demands on the ultra rich could effectively bring the era of the footloose Davos oligarch to a close.
The Unfinished Business of Liberation
On one level, the inability of many great social movements to fully realize those parts of their visions that carried the highest price tags can be seen as a cause for inertia or even despair. If they failed in their plans to usher in a more equitable economic system, how can the climate movement hope to succeed?
There is, however, another way of looking at this track record: these economic demands—for basic public services that work, for decent housing, for land redistribution—represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
The fact that our most heroic social justice movements won on the legal front but suffered big losses on the economic front is precisely why our world is as fundamentally unequal and unfair as it remains. Those losses have left a legacy of continued discrimination, double standards, and entrenched poverty—poverty that deepens with each new crisis. But, at the same time, the economic battles the movements did win are the reason we still have a few institutions left—from libraries to mass transit to public hospitals—based on the wild idea that real equality means equal access to the basic services that create a dignified life. Most critically, all these past movements, in one form or another, are still fighting today—for full human rights and equality regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation; for real decolonization and reparation; for food security and farmers’ rights; against oligarchic rule; and to defend and expand the public sphere.
So climate change does not need some shiny new movement that will magically succeed where others failed. Rather, as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will bring together all of these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams, gathering collective force to finally reach the sea. “The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance,” Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 masterwork, The Wretched of the Earth. “What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”14 Climate change is our chance to right those festering wrongs at last—the unfinished business of liberation.
Winning will certainly take the convergence of diverse constituencies on a scale previously unknown. Because, although there is no perfect historical analogy for the challenge of climate change, there are certainly lessons to learn from the transformative movements of the past. One such lesson is that when major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization. At those junctures, activism becomes something that is not performed by a small tribe within a culture, whether a vanguard of radicals or a subcategory of slick professionals (though each play their part), but becomes an entirely normal activity throughout so
ciety—it’s rent payers associations, women’s auxiliaries, gardening clubs, neighborhood assemblies, trade unions, professional groups, sports teams, youth leagues, and on and on. During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing “activists” and “regular people” became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.
Which brings us back to where we started: climate change and bad timing. It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that it is too late or that we don’t know what to do. There is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. And yet the reason so many of us are inclined to answer Brad Werner’s provocative question in the affirmative is that we are afraid—with good reason—that our political class is wholly incapable of seizing those tools and implementing those plans, since doing so involves unlearning the core tenets of the stifling free-market ideology that governed every stage of their rise to power.
And it’s not just the people we vote into office and then complain about—it’s us. For most of us living in postindustrial societies, when we see the crackling black-and-white footage of general strikes in the 1930s, victory gardens in the 1940s, and Freedom Rides in the 1960s, we simply cannot imagine being part of any mobilization of that depth and scale. That kind of thing was fine for them but surely not us—with our eyes glued to smart phones, attention spans scattered by click bait, loyalties split by the burdens of debt and insecurities of contract work. Where would we organize? Who would we trust enough to lead us? Who, moreover, is “we”?
