RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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This is what an influx looks like

3/9/2015

 
"Although it ain't no party, you're dying to get in" - David Byrne, 'The Civil Wars'

The right-wing and tabloid media reaction to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe has been predictable enough. In July of this year, the breakfast TV cockalorum Eamonn Holmes bemoaned how 'everybody' is 'pussy-footing' around the migrant issue, suggesting that electric fences be used to keep them away. Holmes was not a lone voice. Back in April, Sun columnist Katie Hopkins boldly recommended using gunships to stop the migrants, whom she described as 'cockroaches'. This turns an entry from Winston Smith's diary in Orwell's 1984 ('Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean') into a policy suggestion. And Hopkins is seemingly valued for her controversialism: she is currently enjoying more public exposure - and no doubt financial remuneration - than ever, and now hosts phone-in programmes on LBC radio.

That Hopkins can be allowed to continue as a high-profile media commentator indicates the astonishing callousness of public attitudes to the most desperate global others. Something of this callousness is reflected in the recent British zombie film The Rezort, in which it is discovered that a corporation, with the help of a humanitarian organization, is deliberately turning refugees into zombies to be shot at and abused in a kind of undead theme park.

Day after day throughout this summer, meanwhile, the Daily Mail has been wailing about the 'tides' and 'swarms' of immigrants entering Europe. Even the BBC is getting in on the act. In recent weeks I have heard BBC radio journalists refer to the 'flooding' of migrants into Europe. One Radio 4 journalist, on the very same day that David Cameron was criticized for talking of migrant 'hordes', referred to an 'influx'. Well, here is a picture - one of several banned by Facebook - showing what an influx looks like when it hits the beach. This girl was one of several Middle Eastern children washed up on a Libyan shore, seemingly after a failed attempt to reach Europe via the Mediterranean.
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In recent days, some of these pictures have been circulating on social media and even in mainstream news media, although notably the images that have gained most mainstream traction have been the photographs of a drowned Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, being removed from a Turkish beach. That the Aylan Kurdi photographs have circulated widely in the Western media suggests that there has been a shift in what is representable, although the distancing involved in the long shot photographs of Aylan may suggest that humankind cannot take very much reality (and as some observers have noted, Kurdi appears in the photographs more like a white, European child than the children on the Libyan beach, raising the question of whether Western humanitarian reactions have a racist aspect). Nevertheless, as public consciousness of the scale of this suffering grows, and as ordinary people across Europe mobilize to assist the refugees, much of the mainstream media seems to have been forced to tone down its dehumanising discourse.

Yet the priorities of the capitalist media are fundamentally unchanged. Although The Sun has of late adopted a more sympathetic tone, a recent editorial nonetheless calls, absurdly, for the closure of borders and the (further) bombing of the Middle East as 'solutions' to the refugee crisis. And by failing - or perhaps we should say refusing - to articulate the structural causes of this tragedy, the news media demonstrate what the sociologist Chris Rojek calls 'event consciousness', separating event from process and framing humanitarian emergencies as singular happenings unconnected with wider social and economic processes.

This de-contextualization should be resisted and the origins of these horrific events should be made clear. The roots of today's refugee crises lie in the crisis of capitalism, with its increasingly militarized borders, refugee-creating wars and socio-economic chaos. Capitalism is a deadly and inhuman system: according to its logic, only employees (who can be exploited) and consumers (who can raise profits) exist. Any project aimed at ending capitalism, by contrast, must embrace all of humanity, recognizing and empowering those who, from the point of view of the current social order, do not exist.

Riots in the UK: echo of the past, glimpse of the future

13/8/2011

 
"A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects — who can demand that such a class respect this social order?"
- Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

"It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was this noise really a message?" - Michel Serres, The Parasite


"As for the numerous new civil wars and the vandalism in the downtowns of western cities, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger states that “it is no longer about anything”. But to understand it, one must turn the answer around: “what is this nothing it is about?” It is the total emptiness of money elevated to an end-in-itself, which now definitively rules existence as the secularized god of modernity."
- Robert Kurz, 'The Fatal Pressure of Competition'

Over the past few days, politicians and the mainstream media have been wheeling out their routine condemnations of the 'mindless violence' and 'thuggery' (a term whose etymology and connotations of hip-hop culture are consistent with the widespread tendency to racialise the current events) of the rioters in London and other British cities. Note well the double standard: these are the same politicians and the same media that endorse state terrorism abroad and the appalling social violence inflicted by the state on working-class people at home. Indeed, as Nina Power reminds us, the riots can only be understood in the context of decades of growing social inequality, large-scale unemployment, police oppression and murder, the ruthless reduction of benefits and the slashing of the social wage. The ruling class is - in recent days the point has almost become a leftist cliché - a class of looters. Nevertheless, the bourgeois state insists that its violence is both acceptable and necessary - it is simply 'the way things are' - while the explosions of the poor and the working class are 'totally unacceptable' (as the Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May's put it in her boilerplate response to the disturbances).

Through phrases such as 'mindless violence', political and media - and, indeed, some academic - discourse about the riots has served to deny the political rationality of those who took part in them. As Teun Van Dijk points out in his book Racism and the Press, this has long been a strategy of conservative journalists, whose invectives 'tend to be chosen from very specific style registers, those of mental illness and irrationality, political and ideological intolerance and oppression, and finally that of threatening animals'. It is also a time-honoured strategy of conservatives in response to expressions of social contestation. Consider, for example, the medieval poet John Gower's description of the revolting peasants of 1381 in his Vox Clamantis:

Ecce dei subito fulsit in ilios,
Et mutans formas feceret esse feras.
Qui fuerent homines pruis innate rationis,
Brutorum species irrationis hebent.


[Behold, the curse of God flashed upon them, and changing their shapes, it had made them into wild beasts. They who had been men of reason before had the look of unreasoning beasts]

630 years later, a shopkeeper in a BBC interview calls the London rioters who broke into her premises 'feral rats', the Daily Mail journalist Max Hastings opines that the rioters are 'essentially wild beasts' who 'respond only to instinctive animal impulses' and another Daily Mail columnist, Richard Littlejohn, describes them as a 'wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays' who needed to be clubbed 'like baby seals' (we might also recall the LAPD chief William Parker's racist description of the Watts rioters as 'monkeys in the zoo').

So far so predictable. But as well as overlooking the rioters' explicit verbal and physical expressions of political disaffection and their specific grievances (such as the anger over the beating of a teenage girl who protested at a police station after the killing of Mark Duggan, the 'stop and search' policy, etc.), the discourse of 'mindless violence' betrays an impoverished conception of political agency. While the rioters may not generally have acted in pursuance of a consciously formulated political demand, their actions can be seen as the explosive response of the political unconscious to the 'unknown knowns' (in Žižek's phrase) of the socio-political moment - that is, the deeply felt, if unarticulated experiences of social alienation and inequality.

Of course, it is true that some of the elements of the recent 'violence' have been socially irresponsible. Given the atomisation of the working class in recent decades, how could it be otherwise? The burning of people's homes is deplorable, endangering human life and providing the state with a pretext to hone its repressive apparatuses (indeed, we should certainly not discount the possibility that the state has had a hand in some of the rioting and arson for propaganda purposes). But at some point we have to reckon with the social context of sabotage, as outlined by Gilles Dauvé in 'The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement':

"Since these acts are outside the boundaries of all economic planning, they are also outside the boundaries of “reason”. Newspapers have repeatedly defined them as “anti-social” and “mad”: the danger appears important enough for society to try to suppress it. Christian ideology admitted the suffering and social inequality of the workers; today capitalist ideology imposes equality in the face of wage-labour, but does not tolerate anything opposed to wage-labour. The need felt by the isolated individual to oppose physically his practical transformation into a being totally subjected to capital, shows that this submission is more and more intolerable. Destructive acts are part of an attempt to destroy the mediation of wage labour as the only form of social community. In the silence of the proletariat, sabotage appears as the first stammer of human speech."

And what about the 'looting'? Looting can uncomfortably mirror the bourgeois precept of 'might is right', as well as glorifying individualistic acquisitiveness and commodity fetishism. In this sense, looting hardly provides a model of resistance to the capitalist system. On the other hand, looting does adumbrate, however imperfectly, the communist principle of liberating use values and challenging what Debord called 'the oppressive rationality of the commodity'. At any rate, it is absurd to deny a few television sets and clothes to people who own very little. 

It is sad, but hardly surprising that most of the negative impacts of these riots are being felt in working class communities (as happened in the Watts Riots, the UK riots of the 1980s, the Los Angeles riot in 1992, the French banlieues riots of 2005, and so on). These impacts have provoked a response from nationalist elements, which are now on the streets exploiting the situation in an attempt to spread their poison, further fracturing working class solidarity under the guise of 'protecting society'. There is a large and receptive audience for their ideological garbage. A middle-aged man turned to me yesterday evening, as we watched a burning building, and said, simply: 'too many immigrants'. That such cancerous thoughts can be expressed to a complete stranger, so casually and enthymematically, shows just how deeply the noxious fumes of capitalist ideology have been inhaled by many working class people.

These events are not simply a response to the 'neoliberalism' which it is fashionable for left-liberals to denounce (subtext: if only we could get rid of those nasty Tories and install a more clement, democratic system of exploitation...). Rather, they represent the death throes of the moribund system of capitalism. As the signs of social decomposition become harder to ignore, we should be very clear that the future offers, as Rosa Luxemburg postulated, only two possibilities: socialism or barbarism. The anti-social aspects of these riots, and the response to them by right-wing 'vigilante' groups, give us a glimpse of what that second possibility might look like: a Hobbesian war of each against all, fuelled by racism and nationalism and leading to what Marx and Engels, in one of their gloomier moments, called the 'mutual ruination of the contending classes'.

At the same time, the riots show that there is a limit to how much state oppression and economic misery people are prepared to take before they strike out, however contradictorily, against an inhuman social order. On this occasion, the people striking out may be a relatively small number of those with 'nothing to lose' by looting and burning - but it is in precisely this sense that they are exemplary. The framing of the riots by the media and politicians as a battle between 'them and us' - between decent British citizens and brain-dead yobbos - obscures the fact that we are all losers under capitalism. As average wages fall, rates of social mobility flatline, pensions vanish and the planet suffocates, it is clearer than ever that the entire working class (and arguably most of the ruling class) has nothing to gain from the continuation of the profit system. 

Only class struggle, that is, large-scale organisation against the root cause of the social chaos - the capitalist system - offers a viable future perspective for humanity. As the International Communist Tendency's recent article on the riots puts it:

"It is not for communists to condemn the riots. They are a sign of capitalism’s crisis and decay. [...] So long as capitalism continues on its downward spiral of crisis with the rich getting richer and the poorest more and more excluded there will be more and more explosions like these. The race is on for the revival of a really liberating movement of the working class to present an alternative to capitalist barbarism."

The News of the World scandal: recuperating the crisis

9/7/2011

 
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"It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction"
 - The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

The phone hacking scandal at The News of the World has thrown a spotlight onto a murky culture of collusion and corruption among politicians, the press and the police, whose existence is unlikely to surprise anybody with a rudimentary understanding of those institutions. Nor, sadly, is it surprising that hundreds of News of the Worldworkers will now lose their jobs for the crimes and mistakes of News International managers. News International clearly regards its workers, along with the victims of its hacking, as fair game. In fact, this scandal presents some opportunities for the Murdoch empire. While the News of the World scandal clearly represents an enormous set-back for the Sun King, it will at least allow him to rationalise his newspaper business as the profitability of tabloid newspapers declines. For the non-Murdoch media (such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail) and the anti-Murdoch factions of the British state, meanwhile, the scandal is a godsend.

Unsurprisingly, however, the political dimensions of the phone hacking affair have been ignored in the mainstream media, even by self-styled 'investigative' journalists. In a Spectator article entitled 'What the papers won't say', Peter Oborne castigates politicians and the media for failing to link the scandal to Murdoch's ambitions for BSkyB and asks what he sees as a neglected question: 'whether the owner of News International is any longer a "fit and proper" person to occupy such a dominant position in the British media'. Oborne is pushing at an open door here. The question of Murdoch's moral fitness for mega-moguldom certainly is being raised in those parts of the mainstream media not owned by him (such as The Spectator) and it now looks likely that the decision on Murdoch's BSkyB bid will be deferred, at the very least.

If Oborne really wants to ski off-piste, here are a few questions that actually havebeen ignored by the mainstream media. We know, of course, that the story was broken by The Guardian's Nick Davies; but the question remains: why? Which of Murdoch's many enemies 'pressed the button' on phone hacking? And why now? For obvious reasons, definitive answers to such specific questions are hard to come by; but there can be no doubt that there are elements within the British state that are hostile to Murdoch's pro-US agenda and for whom Murdoch's domination of the British media following a BSkyB takeover was not a welcome prospect. To understand the eruption of this scandal as a well-timed intervention in an inter-bourgeois faction fight is not to embrace a 'conspiracy theory', but to understand that the practical co-operation of various state factions is forever prone to breaking down, giving way to what Marx, in the third volume of Capital, called a 'fight of hostile brothers' whose outcome is 'decided by power and craftiness'.

And here's another largely neglected question: since 'respected' media organisations such as the BBC systematically mislead the public (to take only the most egregious current example, the BBC is blacking out news of the popular movements in Spain and Greece), why do we reserve our moral outrage only for the Murdoch press? The News of the World's news gathering practices are appallingly cynical, it is true. But amid all of the moralising about tabloid journalism, it is worth remembering that in terms of their fundamental ideological commitments, the BBC and Murdoch are on the same side. Indeed, left-liberal complaints about the 'corporate' media and 'neoliberalism' (a concept whose conceptual coherence I have questioned here) all too often underestimate the profound and relentless ideological manipulations of the liberal press and the public service broadcasters.

There may be trouble ahead for that toothless tiger the Press Complaints Commission and tighter press regulation is surely on its way. But there is every probability that this scandal will ultimately only reinforce the power of the British state and its propaganda system, as James Heartfield, with characteristic insight, suggests. In a process that recalls the ruling class's recuperation of the MPs' expenses scandal in 2009, the public outrage over the News of the World's malpractice is being exploited for moral capital by the liberal political and media establishments, as they congratulate themselves for fishing a few rotten apples from the barrel. Nick Clegg, for example, has been assuring the public that the ongoing investigations into the scandal constitute an opportunity to strengthen British democracy.

Meanwhile, left-wing figures such as Neil Kinnock and New Statesman's loyal Labour acolyte Mehdi Hasan have been praising the Labour leader Ed Milliband for standing up to the Murdoch empire, despite the painfully obvious fact that Milliband found his conscience, like all of the politicians, only after news of the scandal broke. The ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is now claiming that he, too, consistently stood up to the Murdoch empire, resisting News Corporation's attempts to bully him into curtailing the activities of the media regulator Ofcom in 2009. But while Brown's disagreements with Murdoch points to the origin of this scandal in the political divisions within the ruling class, Brown's moral grandstanding will not wash: after all, Brown and his wife attended many News International events in recent years.

Clearly, even if we accept the dominant framing of the News of the World scandal as an unforeseen 'crisis' of journalism and not as a well-planned take-down, it is a crisis that is now being exploited by politicians as they seek to reassure the public of the fundamental soundness of the political and media systems.

In their reactions to the News of the World scandal, liberal academics, too, have tended to frame the phone hacking scandal as an aberration, stressing the need for a robustly ethical journalism that fulfils its proper mandate to question power and promote democratic deliberation. Yet all of this assumes that liberal democracy (or even, as the soft-nationalist platitude has it, 'our democracy') is desirable - and that the primary role of political journalism is to promote it. It also assumes that there can, under capitalism, be such a thing as a 'free press' that 'speaks truth to power' - a notion that has been nicely demolished by the International Communist Tendency.

These normative assumptions about democracy and the crusading role of journalism as a fourth estate may give comfort to those who have been understandably sickened by recent revelations. From a more radical perspective, however, they can be seen as discursive 'strategies of containment' (in Fredric Jameson's phrase) that serve to arrest critical reflection on the contradictions of capitalism and the macro-ideological operations of the news media. We should instead, I would argue, see the corruption revealed in the scandal not as an aberration, but as part and parcel of the ordinary workings of the democratic state. We should also see Murdoch's humbling not as a triumph for democratic transparency or a setback for global 'neoliberalism', as many on the left have done, but as the curbing and entrammelling of one faction of the British state by another. And we should be very clear that the ultimate function of mainstream political journalism - whether it comes from the BBC, The Guardian or News International - is not to question and investigate those in power, but to serve their interests.

Greenwashing capitalism: some thoughts on media and 'the environment'

28/4/2011

 
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Oh Perfect Masters / They thrive on disasters – Brian Eno, ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’

The crisis facing what has become known as ‘the environment’ is one of the most prominent subjects on the global news agenda today. And rightly so. Amongst many other disturbing trends, the 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen drew attention to recent dramatic changes in ‘global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events’, adding that ‘there is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climactic shifts’. Indeed, while scientists may disagree about the timescales involved, there is no serious doubt that the global environment is facing a crisis that will massively impact upon its ability to support human life unless it is urgently addressed. There is also little scientific doubt that this crisis is largely the result of human activity (and even where this is not so – as in the case of the planet’s natural emissions of the greenhouse gas methane – human action is nonetheless required to prevent further environmental damage).

News and current affairs media have not always embraced these arguments. The theory of man-made global warming, for example, has been fiercely disputed in a number of television documentaries. The BBC2 series Scare Stories (1997) accused global warming campaigners of being ‘driven by passionate belief rather than verifiable fact’. In the same year, Martin Durkin’s Channel 4 documentary Against Nature compared environmentalists to Nazis and described them as enemies of science – even if the broadcast was later found by the Independent Television Committee to have misrepresented the views of its interviewees. Ten years later, Channel 4 broadcast another Durkin documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007), which again attempted to discredit the theory of anthropogenic climate change. The programme’s arguments and methods were vigorously contested by several scientists, some of whose complaints were upheld by the media regulator Ofcom. The power of the media to misinform the public about environmental issues should not, therefore, be under-estimated. Nevertheless, despite the continued opposition to environmentalism by many vested capitalist interests, explicitly enviro-sceptic arguments are increasingly rare in the contemporary media and, as the reaction to Durkin’s documentaries shows, do not go unchallenged by scientists. As the scientific consensus over global warming and other environmental threats has consolidated, the bourgeoisie has mostly come to recognise the material and ideological advantages of making the public pay for the cost of environmental destruction and of exploiting the public’s growing environmental awareness through the promotion of ‘green’ goods and services. In the media, this new consensus is reflected across the ideological spectrum: even the conservative Express (13 May 2006), for example, details ‘50 Ways to Go Green’. Generally speaking, then, contemporary journalism does not reject scientific evidence about global warming or pollution; rather, it assigns the responsibility for solving these problems to the capitalist state and the lifestyle choices of individual consumers.

In the summer of 2010, CNN’s environmental series Going Green broadcast a horrifying report on the Bangladeshi ship breaking yard at Chittagong. The report noted that unsafe practices at the yard are contaminating the soil and polluting fish stocks, while the workers who carve up the freighters and tankers for scrap metal inhale asbestos and suffer appalling injuries owing to a lack of basic health and safety provision. But while the report served as a powerful reminder of the human and environmental impact of capitalism, particularly among poor and working class people, it failed to set the environmental chaos being wrought in such settings within the wider context of the global capitalist economy. It did not mention, for example, the complicity of Western states in the EU and US in outsourcing dangerous and polluting work to poor countries with laxer safety regulations and did not propose a structural solution to the problems it highlighted; to have done so would have undermined Going Green’s avowed remit to showcase ‘how businesses are balancing their environmental responsibilities with the need for profit’ and to profile entrepreneurs ‘who fight on the side of Mother Nature’. Like almost all media coverage of environmental issues, Going Green can conceive of environmental ‘solutions’ only within the framework of the profit system.

The pitiful example of Chittagong reminds us that capitalism’s degradation of the environment is inextricably bound up with its exploitation of humanity. Class struggle and serious ecological action are thus inseparable – a perspective typically obscured by liberal environmentalists. In his essay ‘Victim of Success: Green Politics Today’, Paul Kingsnorth endorses Jonathan Porritt’s view that both capitalism and communism espouse a productivist paradigm in which ‘increasing centralisation and large-scale bureaucratic control’ contribute to a view of the planet as ‘there to be conquered’. This view of communism is shared by many environmentalist writers; yet it relies upon a conflation of communism with Soviet-style state planning that is quite misleading. The Stalinist Soviet Union, with its social classes and wage labour, surely represented a statified form of capitalism rather than communism. Far from regarding nature as a resource that must be subordinated to humanity’s Promethean will, communism has always appreciated the interconnectedness of humanity and nature. In his book Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster notes that capitalism’s tendency to alienate man not only from himself, but also from nature, was understood by Marx, who wrote in volume I of Capital that ‘all progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil’. As for the charge of Marxist productivism, Engels wrote in The Origin of The Family that ‘we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature – but […] we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, exist in its midst’. Indeed, an understanding of the inter-relationship between humanity and nature is a fundamental to Marxism’s dialectical method. One could even argue, with Žižek, that the ecological crisis is another form of proletarianisation, through which we are deprived of the substance of our existence. At all events, for communists, the environment is emphatically not a resource to be ruthlessly exploited; that view, if anything, is proper to capitalism.

Capitalism is a spectacularly wasteful system characterised by what Marx termed the ‘anarchy of production’. In the system’s regular periods of crisis, it is common for commodities to be massively overproduced; but rather than being given away for free, these commodities are stockpiled or destroyed in order to maintain price levels. Not only are these commodities themselves wasted, but the process of producing the wasted goods contributes to global warming. Moreover, as many studies – from Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers to Giles Slade’s Made to Break – have documented, companies deliberately produce goods with built-in obsolescence in order to maximize profits and increase capital accumulation. Slade points, for example, to the Depression-era marketing campaigns in the US that encouraged rapid automobile replacement. Today’s advertisers, meanwhile, seek to stimulate demand for useless or unnecessary products or encourage us to replace ‘uncool’ consumer goods, such as mobile telephones, before the end of their useful life (‘ashamed of your mobile?’, asks one British television advertisement). Maintaining the production cycle in the interests of profit rather than human need thus comes at a huge environmental cost. It might be added here that capitalism also generates a plethora of socially useless, but environmentally damaging jobs in fields ranging from banking to military ‘defence’, which would be dissolved in a communist society.

The corporations responsible for damaging the environment have every interest in avoiding the costs involved in preventing accidents and minimising pollution. Installing equipment that might prevent or limit environmental damage incurs costs (‘externalities’) that capitalists naturally prefer to shift onto consumers in the form of pollution. This was horrifically illustrated by the explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which left 11 men presumed dead and resulted in a huge spillage of crude oil that profoundly affected the ecology of the Gulf Coast. BP had a track record of such ‘accidents’. An explosion at a Texas City refinery in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured 170 others; investigators later determined that a warning system had been disabled. A congressional committee report on a leak discovered in BP’s pipeline at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2006 also blamed the company’s cost-saving shortcuts. Yet BP was not solely to blame either for these disasters or for the Deepwater tragedy. Although US media reports about Deepwater were quick to emphasise that BP is a British company, the US government bore considerable responsibility for the disaster: in 2009, for example, the US government had exempted BP from an environmental review mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act.

Sometimes the state plays an even more direct role in ecological destruction. The manufacture and testing of weapons needed by capitalist states in pursuit of their imperialist ambitions are hugely destructive of the environment – as is warfare itself. Michael Parenti notes in his book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia that the depleted uranium shells used by NATO in the 1990s Balkan wars have caused widespread contamination and human illness over many years: the bombing of a fertilizer factory and a petrochemical plant in just one Serbian city, Pančevo, released into the atmosphere huge quantities of chemicals dangerous to human beings and contaminated the drinking water of ten million people. In the Middle East, to take another example, the inhabitants of the Gaza strip and West Bank – who are among the most defeated working class people in the world – are forced to wash, cook with and sometimes drink untreated water. They are further subjected to regular bombardments by the Israeli army, which tests its drones and other weapons on the area, contaminating the land with phosphorous and heavy metals, which leads to cancers, deformities and other health problems. Similar phenomena have been observed following the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003; for example, child mortality and cancer rates have skyrocketed in Fallujah since the US attacks on the town.

As these examples suggest, it is not the working class, but the ruling class, through its pursuit of profit and war, that destroys the environment, together with its human inhabitants. For communists, there can be no serious attempt to address the environmental crisis without the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a society in which production and consumption are collectively organised for human need rather than private profit. Predictably, however, the capitalist media strive to deny this conclusion and to shift the responsibility for capitalism’s devastation of the environment onto workers. News and current affairs media tend to generalise the problem of the environment as the responsibility of ‘ordinary people’ through appeals to become more ‘environmentally conscious’ or to ‘do one’s bit’ for the environment by recycling and making ‘ethical’ consumer choices. The public is upbraided for using plastic shopping bags, for buying environmentally ‘unfriendly’ light bulbs or for excessive air travel. To borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, there is a sustained campaign to ‘responsibilize’ the public for global warming and environmental pollution. The gap between the actions and the public pronouncements of the US politician Al Gore indicates something of the hypocrisy of this crusade. Gore asks the audience of his environmental film-lecture An Inconvenient Truth (2006): ‘are you ready to change the way you live?’. Yet the Clinton/Gore administration failed to ratify the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions or to take any serious action on climate change in the 1990s.

The recent ‘ban the bag’ campaign in Britain illustrates some of the limitations of green initiatives. In 2007, Rebecca Hosking became a minor celebrity in Britain after launching a campaign to ban plastic shopping bags. The campaign inspired admiring articles about Hosking and eco-campaigns in the British press. For £1.25, the Daily Mail (27 February 2008), for example, offered readers an Eco Bag, bearing the sanctimonious legend ‘Bags of Ethics’. Yet the environmental impact of the bag ban is highly questionable. According to many commentators, plastic carrier bags, as well as being conveniently re-usable in themselves, are produced using a part of crude oil – naphtha – that if not used to produce bags, would mostly be burned off into the atmosphere. What is undeniable is that the bag ban, as Rob Lyons has noted in spiked magazine, has boosted the ‘green’ credentials of the politicians who have supported it. Clearly, too, making the public pay for plastic bags or reusable ‘eco bags’ boosts the profits of the supermarkets.

The sense of personal responsibility for climate change inculcated by such green initiatives also helps to engineer consent for a reduction in living standards. Not only are workers exhorted to undertake unpaid environmentalist labour – such as sorting and driving their household waste to a recycling centre – but they are asked to reduce their consumption. Writing in The Sun (12 June 2010), Robert Winston endorses Prince Charles’s view that people should ‘consume less’ in order to save the planet. In similar mode, Jeremy Leggett writesin The Guardian (23 January 2010) that we need ‘to consume less “stuff” and to seek a type of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of affluence’. As well as ignoring the reality that the average worker earns less in real terms than he or she did three decades ago, such moralistic attacks on working class consumption are highly congenial to ruling class interests, since they bypass the more fundamental question of capitalist production and prepare the working class for austerity.

That workers tend to suffer disproportionately from the implementation of green taxes and other environmental levies is often overlooked in environmentalist discourse. Media anxieties over the easy availability of ‘cheap flights’ illustrate this point well. Writing in the Express (13 May 2006), Penny Poyzer advises flyers to calculate the CO2 cost of their trips and ‘to invest an equal amount in renewable energies’, while George Marshall in The Guardian (13 September 2007) rightly criticizes the tokenism of the plastic bag ban and other green strategies and observes that flying causes far greater environmental damage. Marshall is, of course, quite right; but it is also necessary to consider who flies and how often. Most of those who pay for cheap flights are working class people who fly infrequently and who are in no position to ‘invest in renewable energies’. The most frequent flyers, meanwhile, are typically well-paid business-people and politicians the cost of whose flights is usually defrayed by expense accounts and who often ‘buy’ their ‘right to pollute’ through carbon offset schemes. Raising the cost of air travel therefore punishes most heavily those who contribute the least to environmental damage through flying.

News and current affairs media thus help to condition the working class to accept responsibility for – and absorb the costs of – environmental damage, allowing capitalists to profit from the sale of prestigious and often expensive ‘environmentally friendly’ products. At the same time, the discourse of ‘ethical consumption’ tends to reduce action over environmental issues to a series of personal lifestyle choices. As Jodi Dean notes in her book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, framing the solution to environmental problems as questions of consumer choice only serves to reproduce capitalist ideology:

"How would climate change, for example, be rendered into the terms of political identity? Is it a matter of lifestyle? Of being the sort of person who drives a Prius and carries an attractive nylon bag to the grocery store? Such a reduction to an imagined ‘green identity’ formats climate change as an issue of individual consumer choice, as a fashionable cause."

As Dean continues, such formatting is premised ‘on the exclusion of collective approaches to systemic problems’. The challenge for communists is to replace these individualized and fetishistic responses to environmental crisis with collective action against capitalism.

It cannot be denied that the left-wing media often articulate valuable environmental critiques. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spillage, The Guardian’s John Vidal (28 May 2010) pointed out that BP could probably have avoided bad publicity if the disaster had occurred elsewhere, since

"there are more than 2,000 major spillage sites in the Niger delta that have never been cleaned up; there are vast areas of the Columbian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon that have been devastated by spillages, the dumping of toxic materials and blowouts. Rivers and wells in Venezuela, Angola, Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda and Sudan have been badly polluted […] The only reason oil costs $70-$100 a barrel today, and not $200, is because the industry has managed to pass on the real costs of extracting the oil."

The Guardian’s George Monbiot (29 September 2009), meanwhile – one of the most incisive environmental journalists – dismisses plans hatched by a billionaire’s club to curb population growth on environmental grounds, noting that it is the rich rather than the poor who despoil the environment most comprehensively, while another report in The Guardian (31 March 2010) cites evidence from the environmental campaign group Greenpeace showing that an oil company had funded an anti-environmentalist group. What even The Guardian’s journalists cannot concede, however, is that since the competitive forces driving environmental devastation are inherent to the capitalist mode of production, it is this system that must be destroyed.

On the contrary, the ‘progressive’ media tend to foster deep illusions about the redemptive possibilities of ‘green capitalism’. Writing in New Statesman (21 June 2010) about the prospects for international environmental co-operation, the leftist environmental activist Bibi van der Zee argues that

"the US and Chinese negotiating teams are made up of those who take the same approach to Mother Earth as a record company takes to a young band starting up: how can we milk this for maximum profit? It’s pointless to hope we can make these people more cuddly – we can’t. How can we make it financially imperative for them to get real? Some proper strategic thinking, please, so that we can get this army all fighting the same enemy."

Van der Zee is quite right to note that the ruling class will exploit the environment for profit to the fullest extent possible; but she is surely wrong to hope that national bourgeoisies can unite to solve environmental problems. The failure of the 2009 Copenhagen environmental summit to even begin to tackle the problem of global warming – a failure acknowledged even by many mainstream journalists – suggests the untenability of this position. Global co-operation to solve human problems is impossible in a system based upon exploitation and international competition for profit. For all their faults, conservative commentators are often clearer on this point than their liberal counterparts. Despite holding a range of dubious enviro-sceptical views, the conservative columnist Dominic Lawson, for example, has rightly pointed out in his articles for The Independent that the profit motive is ultimately incompatible with serious environmental action.

The impossibility of a truly ‘green capitalism’ is further indicated by the protectionist responses of capitalist states to the threats posed by the escalating environmental crisis. A secret Pentagon report obtained by The Observer newspaper in 2004 warned that climate change had the potential to wreak global environmental catastrophe within decades, concluding that the issue should ‘be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a national security concern’. Clearly, while the capitalist state perceives the peril of environmental destruction, it processes this menace not as a challenge facing humanity and requiring international co-operation, but as a threat to the security of the nation state, which must in turn prepare for struggles with other nations over the world’s dwindling natural resources. Already the post-Cold War notion of a multi-polar world has acquired a dismal double meaning as the melting ice cap at the North Pole leads to bitter struggles between Canada, Russia, the US, Denmark and Norway, all of whom have made claims to the underlying seabed, which is suspected of containing vast quantities of undiscovered oil and gas. There is keen competition, too, over the ownership and control of the new shipping routes created by the thawing ice.

Bibi van der Zee’s seemingly pragmatic call to find ways of spurring the ruling class into action thus misses the point that capitalism cannot muster the concerted action required to avert climate change. ‘Getting real’ about the environment requires us not to incentivise the ruling class, but to abolish it, while struggling to create a new society in which the chaos and waste of competitive capitalist production is replaced with the collective and organised production of goods and services aimed at satisfying human need rather than increasing profit. In this sense, we can readily agree with Al Gore that in order to survive as a species we must ‘change the way [we] live’ – albeit rather more radically than Gore envisages.

The time available to effect this change, however, is limited. In order to restore the conditions for capital accumulation in increasingly difficult conditions, capitalism more and more resorts to the destruction of value – whether in the form of human life, infrastructure or the natural environment. Indeed, the effects of climate change and other environmental damage cannot be separated from capitalism’s other ravages. In 2010, a large area of Pakistan was devastated by severe flooding whose onset seemed to confirm scientific warnings about the links between global warming and the increased incidence of intense rainfall; yet many of those affected were already suffering from the effects of dire poverty as well as the state’s ongoing war against the Taliban and US drone attacks. The floods also provided a valuable opportunity for the Taliban – the only organisation distributing aid to many flood victims – to gain new recruits to its cause. As Naomi Klein notes in The Shock Doctrine, capitalism’s disasters concatenate, so that a profits-oriented economic system, ‘while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters […], whether military, ecological, or financial’. Day by day, these disasters are also jeopardising the potential for the communist transformation of the planet. In the meantime, it is not the discredited enviro-scepticism of the conservative right, but the liberal fantasy of ‘green’ capitalism that represents the most pernicious mystification of the environmental challenges we face today.

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