There are times when the veil of delusion, the web of weasel words that weaves our brains into complacent compliance, tears of its own accord and we can see them for what they are.
When the peaceful encampment at UCLA calling for the University to divest its investments in Israel was attacked overnight by masked far right Israeli supporters spraying mace, throwing fireworks and wielding iron bars, aerial footage showed a large concentration of police vans just a few blocks away. It was apparent from the film that the violence and aggression was coming from the pro Israeli side. Resistance from the occupation came in the form of holding up the barricades that the attackers were trying to tear down. The Police did not intervene. Analogies with the West Bank, where far right settlers attack Palestinian villages while the IDF stands by, and sometimes joined in, were hard to avoid.
The attack failed.
So, the following day, the Police themselves in full riot gear, steamed in to smash the occupation and arrest the students taking part. The state having far greater resources than a bunch of vigilantes. Film of students – who had been protesting peacefully – being brutally dragged off, their wrists fastened behind their backs with plastic ties were all over the news.
The similarity in the style of attack juxtaposed together coming so soon after each other was obvious. You could see it.
But the news framed this violent Police action as an attempt to stop violence on campus. You couldn’t make it up. But, in a way, they did just that. And in so doing they reveal what they are. The longer this goes on, the more the masks will slip.
Personal Note: The demand for disinvestment is a crucial one. When I was a student in the 1970s, our Anti-Apartheid society had a campaign for the University I was at to disinvest from investments in South Africa. As the Secretary of the group I had to take in a petition to the University Bursar and try to negotiate with him. Brushing aside my arguments about the sheer immorality and inhumanity of Apartheid and the University’s complicity in it, he commented “Essentially, you want us to opt out of the capitalist system”, before phoning his PA to ask for roast beef, “left a little pink in the middle”, for lunch. I drew the conclusion that if breaking with Apartheid required breaking with capitalism, thats what we’d have to do.
This cartoon is based on a design by the Atelieres Populaires for workers at the Renault Flins factory, who were occupying their plant as part of the General Strike in May – June 1968 and were coming under attack from the CRS riot police as a result.
As we move into a period in which the powers that be will be retreating and retrenching on climate policy, we can expect discredited arguments and factoids to be churned out with dreary regularity; so that anyone who does not want to confront the realities we face has a set of one liners to trot out to deflect thought and effort.
This series of blogs is aimed at giving workers and activists the information we need to debunk these claims if a workmate, friend or relative comes out with one of them.
A recently distributed leaflet, very glossy but with no publisher acknowledged, makes the claim that Humans thrive in warm climates straight after arguing that the world is not heating up; stating Humans have always thrived in warm climates. Even if the world were warming, warmth is by no means a threat, ice ages ARE. Every year many more people die in the colder winter months, even in the UK, see ONS data”.
The key word here is “warm”. We are already getting well beyond that. Here’s some examples, with thanks to Simon Erskine for compiling them. These arguments will be useful in the context of “Phew! What a scorcher!” and “Hotter than Morroco!” headlines in the tabloids. For those who can absorb anecdotes more easily than statitsics, a useful question is, “Have you noticed how, until a few years ago, every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe, but now, have you noticed how people go out and sit in the shade under the tres because the heat is becoming uncomfortable?”
Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared a national disaster amid a prolonged drought that has destroyed about half the country’s maize crop, BBC News reports. He joins neighbouring nations in southern Africa, Zambia and Malawi, both of which have recently declared similar states of emergency, the article adds.
“Unprecedented” temperatures are being reached across south-east Asia, including in parts of Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar, according to the Guardian. It points to lengthy spells of dry weather in Indonesia driving up rice prices and fears that coral is under threat in Thailand due to high water temperatures. The newspaper says the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has “attributed the scorching weather to human-induced climate change, as well as the El Niño event, which brings hotter, drier conditions to the region”.
In Santiago, Chile, an 11-day heatwave has ended, becoming “the longest in history,” according to Raúl Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago, La Tercera reports.
The UK may face water shortages and hosepipe bans this summer, despite recording record-breaking rainfall over the past 18 months, the Times reports. The i newspaper notes that the UK population has increased by 10 million over the past three decades, while “climate change has put pressure on existing reserves”. The Guardian reports that the Environment Agency released a report last week, which “predicts a growing shortfall of water in coming years, leading to a deficit of almost 5bn litres of water a day by 2050”. The National Farmers Union has warned that flooding and other extreme weather linked to climate change will undermine UK food production, BBC News reports. The article says this comes after “record-breaking rain over the past few months”, which “has left fields of crops under water and livestock’s health at risk”.
Russia and Kazakhstan have ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate after melting snow swelled rivers beyond bursting point, leading to the worst flooding in the area for at least 70 years, reports Reuters.
The United Arab Emirates has been hit by an intense storm, with the country experiencing its heaviest rains in 75 years, according to meteorological authorities, reports the Financial Times. Almost 6 inches (152mm) of rain fell on the capital Dubai on Tuesday, a year and a half’s worth of rain in a single day, causing travel disruptions, reports the Independent. In related news, the death toll from flooding in Pakistan has risen to 63, the Associated Press reports.
The deadly heatwave that hit West Africa and the Sahel over recent weeks would have been “impossible” without human-induced climate change, scientists have said, reports BBC News. Temperatures in Mali soared to above 48C, with one hospital linking hundreds of deaths to the extreme heat, it continues. Researchers found that human activities such as burning fossil fuels made temperatures up to 1.4C hotter than normal, the article adds. On 3 April, temperatures hit 48.5C in the south-western city of Kayes in Mali, with intense heat continuing for more than five days and nights, giving no time for vulnerable people to recover, reports the Guardian.
The “unprecedented” warming of the oceans over the past year has had widespread repercussions on marine life, an EU environment chief has warned, reports the Financial Times. This includes impacting already dwindling native fish species such as Baltic Sea Cod, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius said, citing the migration of the cod towards colder waters near Russia and Norway as an example of the impact on biodiversity of rising temperatures, it adds.
The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly global temperature records, with April 2024 on track to extend this streak to 11, wrote Dr Zeke Hausfather in his latest quarterly “state of the climate” report for Carbon Brief. The graph at the end of this email shows monthly temperatures over 1940-2024, plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Based on the year so far and the current El Niño forecast, Carbon Brief estimates that global temperatures in 2024 are likely to average out at around 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The Independent reports that a “punishing heatwave” has forced the government in Bangladesh to shut schools for 33 million children “as the country battles the hottest April in three decades”. The Guardian has an article with the headline, “Wave of exceptionally hot weather scorches south and south-east Asia”. It says millions of people across the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and India are facing dangerous temperatures as the hottest months of the year are made worse by El Niño.
Mexico: Drought spreads to almost 80% of the country; there are 10 states with 100% of municipalities affected.
As India heads to polls amid 45C heat, fears mount over voters’ safety. Bloomberg columnist David Fickling asks: “How can India hold elections when it’s too hot to vote?”
The Washington Post carries a feature headlined: “Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era.” It says Nasa’s Dr Gavin Schmidt indicates that what happens in the next few months…could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift – a quantum leap in warming that is confounding climate models and stoking ever more dangerous weather extremes”.
Now that this is the trend, unions are developing stronger guidelines for working in extreme heat. This is a serious matter as some right wing
Back Row: Cecil (Tom) Atkin (with parasol), Henry Cunningham. Middle Row: Fred Pond, Win Pond, Ruth Atkin, Daisy Cunningham (all three sisters, formerly Ellis). Front Row: Len Cunningham (with ball) Ron Atkin (with life belt).
A week of collective freedom
This picture captures some of the excitement and happiness unleashed by the legislation that set up a weeks paid holiday for workers introduced in 1938, after “a tough battle, one that pitted campaigners against government intransigence and resistance from employers”.
Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.
The French here is deliberate; as one of the pressures on the government here came from legislation introduced by the Popular Front government in France for the 40 hour week and paid holidays for all two years earlier, after a massive wave of strikes and factory occupations, as well as similar developments in Belgium, Norway and the USA (with FDR’s New Deal).
So, to some extent, my family owe the good time they had and their carefree smiles to Leon Blum.
Daan to Margit...a long time before Chas n Dave
My Dad’s family, like so many others, took off for Margate for the week. The back of the photo shows it to be a post card. So photographers would set up a bespoke postcard from holidaymakers that they could have taken and copied to send off home, as a personal and more taseful alternative to the “cheeky” sort.
My Mum’s family, not pictured here, did the same. “We went to Margate. It was so COLD”. Miles of lovely beach, but the wind was so cold.” Both families stayed in B&Bs. “When you went back to where we were staying all you could smell all through the house was greens being cooked” (Mum).
Sunday School outings
Margate came at the end of a train journey, and gave a more exciting view of a seaside more expansive and a seaside town grander by far than those provided by the Sunday School charabang trips to Maldon, travel sickness included, that both my parents had been on for the preceding couple of years to see the sea; complete with refreshments from a tent that served up mugs of very brown tea from enormous enamel pots.
Woolly Cozzies
My Dad is wearing quite a classy boys swimsuit here. Not the one his Mum had knitted for him, as a lot of Mums did at that time; because it was much cheaper than buying one. These had the advantage of being warm before you went in the water, but had the downside of becoming incredibly heavy (and hard to keep up) as soon as you did.
Not Lobby Lud
As workers on holiday were much less likely to buy a daily paper – getting away from it all meaning getting away from it all – so, with all the factories closing pretty much at once, and facing a disastrous, if temporary, slump in circulation, the Daily Mirror and a few others like the News Chronicle used to publish a photo of a repesentative who would be present at the seaside during the holiday, so people who recognised him could approach and say “You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £5”; but with a variation printed only in that morning’s paper without which it wouldn’t work.
With average worker’s wages at 1 shilling and 2 pence an hour in 1938, this was equivalent to two weeks wages; so, worth buying a paper for.
At one point on this holiday, my grandfather was convinced he’d seen him, walked over and staked his claim. To no avail. The man said he wasn’t the mark. So, he bought a Daily Mirror to get the right form of words and tried again and, once again, and slightly more irritated, the man said he wasn’t. So, perhaps he was, but was off duty for a bit and was therefore irritated to be approached. Or he was a Lobby Lud lookalike and got approached all the time; in which case its a wonder he wasn’t more irritated than he was.
Darkness at noon?
Fred, sitting at the end of the line with the parasol, had a dark skin. After the outbreak of World War 2, just over a year later, he was in the RAF and, like a lot of other RAF personnel, was sent to Southern Africa for training; where he found that his uniform was no guarantee of being allowed into “Whites Only” bars or cafes, applying the strict colour bar that was the precursor to the fully fledged Apartheid entrenched there after 1948.
This photo was taken 20 years after the end of the First World War, and just over a year before the start of the Second. No cloud seems to dim the happiness. The sun is shining. The wind is fresh. The sand is soft and gritty. The ice creams are cold and sweet. A little bit of heaven outside the daily grind and in between two horrors.
The news that MI5 has told Universities to restrict cooperation with Chinese Universities on “national security” grounds looks like self harm when you consider that China leads the “West” in 37 out of 44 key and emerging technologies.
According to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute funded by the US State Department, Over the past five years, China
hosts seven of the world’s top 10 research institutions.
generated 48.49% of the world’s high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics
is likely to emerge with a monopoly in 10 fields including synthetic biology, where it produces one-third of all research, as well as electric batteries, 5G, and nano manufacturing
is strong enough in the fields of photonic sensors and quantum communication, to “go dark” to the surveillance of western intelligence.
Overall, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked first or second in most of the 44 technologies tracked, which included defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and quantum technology.
The Report attributes this to government support and funding but, instead of supporting greater collaboration and sharing, or emulating the model of state led investment in technological development – which clearly works – or recognising that science and technology in the “West” can benefit from learning from the cutting edge work being done in China, we have proposals based on Cold War paranoia that are as much an act of self harm as cutting Huewai out of the 5G Network to use slower, more expensive Western alternatives.
the UK spends $74.9 billion for a population of 68 million.
Russia spends $109 billion for a population of 144 million.
China spends $296 billion for a population of 1,400 million.
So, the UK spends $1101 per person, almost one and a half times as much as Russia’s spend of $757 per person and more than 5 times as much as China’s $211 per person.
That looks like this.
So, perhaps the UK is on more than enough of a war footing as it is; as its participation in so many wars, overtly and covertly, demonstrates.
If the UK were to go for parity with Russia’s per capita spend, it could save about $20 billion a year (£16 billion). If it were to go for parity with China, it would save $60 billion a year ($48 billion). We could do a lot with that. An additional dividend from these savings might actually be peace.
The United States, of course, is in a league of its own, with a per capita spend of $3,210. If they were to spend what the Russians do, that would free up $687 billion every year. Think what could be done with that.
We will put the UK’s own defence industry on a war footing.Rishi Sunak
The UK spends more on its armed forces than every other country in the world bar six.
Why is it that the countries that spend the most on their militaries, and bomb and invade other countries the most, think that it makes the world safer if they spend even more?
David Lammy’s recent article, The Case for Progressive Realism. Why Britain Must Chart a New Global Course in Foreign Affairs claims to base itself on a “politics based on respect for facts”, to look for “realist means to pursue progressive ends” and seek “the pursuit of ideals without delusions”. His problem is that the “facts” he uses are filtered by and seen through an ideological lens that distorts them, turns things upside down and inside out; and it rapidly becomes clear that the “new course” he proposes is a reprise of the old one; as the “chart” he is using is marked up with the same old, same old Foreign Policy Shibboleths that have defined UK policy since Suez. Primarily being most favoured auxiliary for the USA during the “American Century”, and a willing supporter of attempts to prolong it for another.
Lammy aims to square a lot of circles, because that course is now increasingly unviable, and the contradictions are starting to creak. In the attempt he skates at speed across a thin ice of delusions about the world that make the ideals he touches on in places unattainable. The “means” that he defines as “realistic” are incompatible with the ends he describes as “progressive”. It is therefore not entirely coherent. Andrew Fisher, possibly kindly, describes his article as a “word salad”.
Before going through this point by point, more or less in his order, I’d like to examine one extraordinarily strange phrase that crops up near the end but, in its way, summarises the fundamental contorted distortions of his world view.
He writes “at times in the Twentieth Century, Western powers undermined the sovreignty of weaker states, especially in the Global South”.
Where do you start with this?
“At times”. As if this were an occasional aberation. An uncharacteristic lapse from an otherwise egalitarian norm of sunny mutual respect. As in, the people of the Congo had their sovreignty “undermined” “at times” by Belgium and “at times” died in their millions. Or, “at times”, Britain presided over famines in India that it took independence to stop. I could go on.
Do I really have to point out that, for the first half of the Twentieth Century, most of the Global South had no sovreignty at all, as they were under the direct territorial control of “Western” Imperial powers.
Nor that this was not abandoned willingly by the “West” in the second half of the century either.
The UK, France and Portugal fought a series of viscious post colonial rearguard actions against independence movements right up to the 1970s; Vietnam, Malaya, Aden (Yemen), Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinnea-Bissau.
Settler colonial regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa kept this up to the 1980s and 90s, and Israel is still doing it today.
The United States picked up “the white man’s burden” from France in Vietnam with lethal effect (2 million killed) backed coups and military take overs in Indonesia (600,000 killed) and all over Latin America; Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile.
The “neo colonial” settlement that allowed formal independence for former colonies left them at the mercy of their former colonial overlords, sometimes embodied in formal structures ensuring financial control and military presence, as in France Afrique until recently; leaving most of the Global South for most of the rest of the twentieth century hog tied by debt and unequal exchange, and sometimes fought over for resources.
Within this, the US gained greater weight over its imperial rivals via economic domination (the US notion of “decolonisation” being the removal of barriers put in the way of their trade by the territorial control of imperial competitors).
This has led to a process of incorporation and subordination of European powers and Japan into a dominant US centred imperial bloc with a parasitic relationship to the rest of the world; which is where we are now.
Western powers “undermine the sovreignty of weaker powers, especially in the Global South”, not just “at times”, butdo so all the time as a structural norm. This is underpinned by an unparallelled capacity to unleash violence on anyone who steps out of line. Recognising this is “realism”. Failing to see it is “delusion”. Accepting or supporting it is siding with the oppressor against the oppressed, the exploiter against the exploited. Always.
Things ain’t what they used to be
Lammy, however, starts his essay by bemoaning how this has began to change; comparing the world at the time of the last Labour landslide in 1997 with the one that will greet the next in 2024.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was possible to believe in an eternal Pax Americana, in which the entire world would eventually turn into one gigantic American suburb, through US led globalisation and the wonders of the free market. This was a fantasy, even at the time.
What Lammy describes as “the liberal democratic model” – in which all countries would eventually become wealthy clones of the US (just later in the fullness of time, after a little bit of inevitable gradualism) – meant for most of the world to continue living under the crushing weight of the Washington consensus; which policed all development in US interests, guaranteeing that millions were trapped in extreme poverty, forced to live in teeming self built slums, or rural desperation, their resources extracted for little or no benefit by Western multinationals, essential services like water supply privatised; with the threat of military intervention standing permanently behind the IMF and the World Bank.
In 1997, with a slight whiff of “Good Old Days” nostalgia, he notes that the UK had an economy that was larger than those of China and India combined; and it still adminstered Hong Kong as a colony. Not any more. Never again.
Bull in a China shop
Now, as Lammy notes, “China is a superpower”. It has a larger economy than the US, in Purchase Power Partity terms. Lammy does not note, but we should, that it has been mostly in this period from 1997 that China lifted 850 million of its people out of poverty, and eliminated extreme poverty altogether in 2020. A feat described by a Labour Foreign Policy Group report in 2021 as “perhaps the single most significant contribution to human wellbeing in world history”. Something that you’d think someone with “ideals” and “moral purpose” might welcome, or even seek to learn from.
But not a bit of it. Lammy chooses to interpret this as a threat and a “systemic challenge to British interests” (a phrase that begs more than one question).
“Democracies” – a word he uses as a euphemism for the core Imperial powers which are tightly allied to, and coralled, by the United States – are “on the back foot” and losing the “hearts and minds” of the Global South “middle class”; such that “countries described … by CIA Director William Burns as the “hedging middle” are striking bargains and setting their own agendas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America” and, even worse, “they ignore the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States ever more frequently”.
They are just not doing what they are told anymore, dammit!
It is the rise of China, and the failure of the US to contain it, that has sent US politics into such a delirious tailspin. Because, if the US truly is the one indispensible nation, with a political and economic system that is the best in the world, then this should not be happening. But, happening it is. And, if everything you believe about the world is being shown to be false, but you can’t bring yourself to break with your beliefs, it becomes possible, even necessary, to believe ten impossible things before breakfast to try to make sense of it. An impulse to seek truth from anything other than the facts is characteristic of the MAGA movement, but not confined to them. “Realism” is too unbearable to be acceptable. So, dangerous fantasies take its place.
We should note at this point that more people in China think that their country is a democracy – a country run in the interests of the people – than people in the US do. In a study published by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation and Latana data tracking firm, when asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with 83% saying it is, and 91% also saying that this is important to them. In the US, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy and 76%, said it was important.
That looks like this.
Percentage of people in each country that consider it to be a democracy
We should also note that Lammy’s concern with the “middle class” in the Global South is an odd one if his major concern is with development. A striking feature of most of the Global South is the class polarisation, with very extreme Gini coefficients which show a wealthy layer with living standards comparable to those in the “West” sitting on top of a much larger number of impoverished people living in varying degrees of desperate precarity. Rajiv Ghandi’s formula of “France in India” is quite a good way to envisage this; that India contained a nation with roughly the same population and wealth as France – about 65 million – atop over a billion living in desperate straits. This polarity explains the extremity of Rightist Global South politics, producing figures like Bolsonaro or Milei. Wealthy people living in close proximity to teeming masses that they feel threatened by often feel the need to keep in their place with extreme violence. I suspect that when Lammy talks of the “middle class”, he is refering to the wealthier sort, who are in no way middling, economically or politically, but he never clarifies.
Lammy comes back down to Earth to note, appropriately, that “Climate breakdown is no longer a future worry. It is here”. He also notes that China, the US and EU all have green transition plans that require large amounts of state led investment, to a degree that the UK does not, but without digging into the figures that show that only China is doing this on the necessary scale. This is from Adam Tooze. “Measured against the $ 4 trillion per annum benchmark, the only country(my emphasis) that over the last decade has come anywhere close to spending, lending and investing on the required scale is CCP-led China“.
Bloomberg’s tabulation of the $1.1 Trillion investment in energy transition in 2022 shows the following.
China’s investment in energy transition in 2022 was almost double that of the US and EU put together. And this gap is accelerating.
It might be fair to conclude from this that it is just as well that China did not follow the Western economic model, and that its state directed economy is better able to deal with this challenge. Without their investment in renewables, having made them cheaper than fossil fuels, we would already be sunk.
Lammy however regrets that China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation did not lead to the adoption of “liberal democratic values”, putting the private sector in the driving seat of the economy and polity. Had they done so, China could be just as succesful as we are with our neo liberal model that crashed in 2008, is now leading to ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority; while infrastructure crumbles and standards of living for the majority stagnate or decline. In fact, China is the only large economy in the world in which wage rates have risen consistently for workers in the last decade, such that these are now higher than they are in Portugal and Greece and comparable with Poland.
I think Lammy is being a bit previous in stating that “the rise of China has ended the era of US hegemony”, but it certainly challenges it in trade, technology and scientific innovation – all of which flows from China’s refusal to accept permanent status as a low grade mass manufacturer, most favoured sweat shop providing cheap imports for Western consumers, while stuck in a middle level development trap for its own citizens.
Most countries around the world now trade more with China than the US, and this is a trajectory that is increasing, making attempts to “decouple” an act of self harm. This is true even when defined as “derisking” (a phrase based on the paranoia that its so much worse if a Chinese smart fridge company knows when you need to buy more milk than when Google does). Cutting Chinese tech out of 5G broadband – the most advanced in the world – is an example of voluntarily adopting additional costs for a slower service, which has the additional negative consequence of increasing unnecessary tensions. Partly because of US high technology sanctions, China has increasingly innovated and is now considered to have a lead in 37 out of 44 key technological indicators. This is particularly crucial in green transition, so “derisking” in this area carries with it a lot of serious risks that we can’t afford.
The key area in which the US maintains a crushing dominance is precisely the one that Lammy tries to present as the most threatening; the military. Lammy warns that the Chinese Navy has more ships than any other, but, as World Population Review points out, counting a small patrol vessel as having the same significance as an aircraft carrier “is akin to saying a squirrel is the same as a rhino, or a scooter is the same as an 18-wheel semi-truck”, so, “to better estimate the overall power of a given navy, some analysts turn to tonnage, which is a measure of the amount of water a ship displaces or the amount of cargo it can carry”. By this measure, the US Navy, at 3,415,893 tonnes, is just under five times bigger than the Chinese Navy, at 708,886 tonnes. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, you’d expect Lammy to know that. Perhaps he does, and is just chancing his arm in the hope that no one will check.
We can also look at this in terms of the scale of overall military spending. This year, the US is spending $831,781,000,000 on its front line military. Monthly Review has argued for some years that US military spending figures underestimate the true quantity by about half, but, even if we go with the declared amount, China’s spend of $227,000,000,000 is less than a third of the US total.
This understimates the balance, however, as direct US allies in the region, like Australia (which has a collosal military budget for a country its size), Japan and South Korea add an additional $150 billion; and some proportion of the UK’s $62 billion has to be allocated through its commitments to the AUKUS Treaty. And we should note that all these allies are under intense US pressure to increase and coordinate this spending, and other NATO allies like Italy are entering into joint projects with Japan, which is doubling its expenditure at the present time.
You can look at it in terms of overseas bases too. The US has 750 bases in 80 countries. China has 1 (in 1). The US bases near China encircle it, as we can see here. There are no Chinese bases anywhere near the United States.
The same applies to deployment. US aircraft carrier task forces, sometimes with the Royal Navy’s new carriers (probably the ugliest boats in the world, not an essential point, but they really are hideous looking) as auxiliaries regularly steam up and down the South China Sea. No Chinese Navy forces at all deploy to the Gulf of Mexico or English Channel. Imagine the headlines in the Daily Mail or USA Today if they did. In that light, it is quite amazing how calmly China takes this.
You can also look at it in terms of balance of nuclear power. The United States has 5,244 nuclear weapons. China has 500, a tenth as many. China also has a defensive, no first strike policy – the only nuclear power to have one. A First Strike policy has been US military doctrine since the 1960s, and remains so, even though it has been known since the 1980s that this would be suicidal even if it worked. The explosion of smoke and debris above the cloud layer from the first overwhelming salvo of missiles would blot out sunlight for several years; causing a nuclear winter that would obliterate the “victorious” powers through temperature collapse and starvation, just as surely as the defeated would be incinerated and blasted to death. For a sobering and essential examination of this see John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism.
Characteristically, Lammy does not note that no one in China is arguing for a war with the United States. In fact they argue for “win, win cooperation” and “a common home for humanity” as we move towards an “ecological civilisation”; all of which seem both reasonable and essential positions that it would be helpful for humanity if the West were to respond to positively. Nor does he point out that arguing for such a war within the next decade as the only way to stop a peaceful rise by China is now a live debate in mainstream US Foriegn Policy circles; and that maybe this is more than somewhat unhinged.
Arising from all this, the question that has to be realistically asked is, who is threatening whom? Who is posing the “real security threat” and how dangerous is this, realistically? And shouldn’t Labour be seeking to restrain this rather than hype it up and cheer it on? Instead Lammy argues for AUKUS to be “a floor not a ceiling”. This is, realistically, a path to war; the consequence of which cannot be considered to have any “moral purpose” whatsoever.
It is slightly mind boggling that, while he pushes this antagonistic and confrontational military alliance, he thinks positive engagement with China on economic development, climate breakdown and AI (particularly as China is leading on this) can pootle along happily in a sort of paralell universe, not distracted at all by the war drums he is so busily beating, nor thrown off course by the diversion of necessary investment into the suicidal dead end of an arms race. You can make up your own mind about whether this is remotely “realistic” or contains a scintilla of “moral purpose”.
Little Britain blues
More parochially, in an attempt to have “tough minded honesty about the UK”, Lammy goes on to note what he sees as its three key problems.
Its economy is stuck in a low growth, low productivity, low investment slump. Which, given his concern with green transition and positive remarks about state led investment in China, the EU and US, should make him question why Labour has shrunk its green investment plan to little more than is already on the stocks from the Conservatives. He notes that the UK has the lowest level of investment in the G7, but seems to think that Keir Starmer’s “mission” to get the highest growth is possible without this investment, if only the country would have enough self belief. As delusions go, this is a big one.
Its armed forces are too small; which is only the case if you want to prepare for a war that could easily kill us all instead of taking active steps to avert it.
Public Services are crumbling. He could have noted that this also goes for infrastructure, which brings us back to the need for investment which the “realism” of the Shadow Treasury team rules out. So, do not pass Go…
Realism is for him embodied by Ernest Bevin’s actions as Foreign Secretary in the post war Labour government. The flip side of the progressive measures taken by that government, founding the welfare state and NHS, nationalising key industries, was its resolute continuity in Imperial Foriegn Policy; which led it to resist decolonisation, form NATO, aquire atomic bombs, join in the Korean war: and maintain military spending at such a high level that it had to sustain austerity to a degree that got it voted out of office in 1951.
Recognising that “realism alone will not be enough to save the planet” – which essentially means that “realism” defined in this way is anything but realistic – and that the “West” has “to cooperate with its rivals on climate change and AI” leads him to disinter the ghost of Robin Cook as the Push Me to Ernest Bevin’s Pull You. Cook is lauded for his promotion of “human rights” and “soft power”, embodied in the 0.7% of GDP allocated to development aid (a figure that Lammy notes, but does not commit to restoring) and his “realism” in making “hard choices” about “arms exports”, ie letting them go ahead. Lammy’s subsequent assertion that “governments don’t have to choose between values and interests” is belied by this.
Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t
So far so confusing; but Lammy’s attempt to have his bomb and drop it continues. The “West” made mistakes. Its interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the whole war on terror, became “seen as” a “recipe for disorder” because, despite initial military wins, it was unable to stabilise a viable pro Western regime anywhere. Its power lasted just as long as it could sustain boots on the ground, which is not indefinitely. The resulting chaos and impoverishment has not gone unnoticed across the world. The “moral purpose” that Lammy argues for, loses out to “self interest” every time. And because, of the decadent, parasitic stage they are now in, the US and its allies are sucking capital in, not spreading it out, and are therefore incapable of “nation building”.
Four and a half million people were killed in these wars, which I think should be categorised as the first phase of the Wars for the New American Century. Ukraine and Gaza are the start of an even more dangerous second phase, as a more desperate US takes greater risks.
The Rules are for the Little People
Lammy takes the Rules Based International Order as the embodiment of a viable global civilisation, but it is widely understood in the world that the rule that defines the rules is that Washington makes all them, none of them apply to the USA (and select few of its closest allies) and they will be changed on a whim.
A small example of this was the 1984 case at the International Court of Justice in 1984, when Nicaragua won compensation of £17 billion from the US for the damage done by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports. Not a cent was paid. Who was going to make them?
A more recent example is the reaction to the ICJ ruling that Israel has a case to answer that it is commiting genocide in Gaza. The instant reaction from the US and its allies was to defund UNWRA on the back of unsubstantiated accusations from Israel that some of its workers took part in Oct 7th. That is a direct act of collusion in the attempt to starve Palestinians, and two fingers up to the formal structures of international law.
So, the failure of these interventions were a blow to Western hegemony. As Tom Tugendhat put it after the Afghan withdrawal “This feels like defeat”. But, in a quick pivot, Lammy asserts that Western standing was also damaged by the failure to intervene in Syria, or take a harder line in Ukraine in 2014.
What Lammy is describing here, without thinking it through, is that whatever the “West” does, deepens its crisis. It loses ground when it doesn’t intervene, causes chaos when it does.
Pursuing War not Peace in Ukraine
This is demonstrably the case in Ukraine. The West is supporting Ukraine like a rope supports a hanging man. The country is being destroyed. More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died so far. A great investment according to David Cameron, as “not a single American life has been lost”.
If their concern were genuinely with peace and security in Europe, NATO would at least have been prepared to negotiate with Russia about mutual security arrangements in the Winter of 2021. Instead, we had a hubristic refusal to engage to ease off tensions, which has led to the war which NATO is now visibly losing, amidst appalling casualties and damage.
The sanctions against Russia have failed. Most of the world does not support them, because, as Lammy notes, they see the conflict as between “the West vs the rest”; and have long experience of not being “at the table” with the US, and therefore being “on the menu”, as Antony Blinken put it recently. And they are no longer so securely under the West’s thumb.
Lammy’s support for military “burden sharing” for “as long as it takes to secure victory” is hard to square with any notion of “realism” if “victory” means Ukraine reconquering parts of its pre 2014 territory which actually see themselves as Russian. Even people who consider that to be desirable, have a hard job arguing that its possible. Phrases like “once Ukraine has prevailed” are evidently hollow.
Instead of looking to a peace agreement, as outlined here, that would allow all people in all parts of Ukraine to live in the state they wish to, secure neutrailty and reduce military tensions across the continent, Lammy argues for a “long term generational response” to the “Russian threat”. Again, this is playing on fantasies, as NATO at present already spends more than eleven times as much as the Russians do on its military. That looks like this.
Total military spending 2024
The NATO bloc on this is approprately reminiscent of Pacman, and should probably have teeth drawn on it
What Lammy is proposing is a long term “generational” increase in the military industrial complex and militarisation of society, with some military sources floating the reintroduction of conscription, at a time in which the “realism” of the Treasury team will impose freezes and austerity on everything else.
The (Republican) Elephant in the room
Lammy’s argument for closer links with EU powers, and bilateral pacts to supplement NATO, are the only hint of the nervousness that all the Labour front bench feel that they could be coming into power at the same point that Donald Trump takes back possession of the White House.
Its not surprising that Lammy – with stopping climate change one of his progressive aims – does not explore this possibility; as the US under Trump would go full rogue state on climate change, pull out of the Paris Agreement like they did before and “drill, drill drill” – with an overall impact of an additional 4 billion tonnes of CO2 released by the US the end of his second term. This would make a 1.5C limit completely unachievable, and the damage globally would be horrific.
Lammy, as potential Foreign Secretary would therefore either have to straddle an impossible contradiction in which the main perceived “threat”, China, was investing in the necessary transition, while the “foundation of UK security”, the US, was sabotaging it. As he says, “no country can go green without cooperation”. So, who would he seek to cooperate with? He could only resolve this contradiction by dropping concern with climate change and playing down its significance so as not to upset the “special relationship”, or break with US policy in pursuit of the only realistic understanding of its consequences. It might be argued that Labour’s downgrade of its $28 billion green investment pledge is a pre emptive move to anticipate a Trump Presidency, not just pusillanimity in the face of Neanderthal Tory attacks. This is a concrete choice that has neither “moral purpose” nor “realism”.
“I think it is absolutely in the interest of US security. It is extremely good value for money for the United States and others, for perhaps about 5 or 10% of your (US) defence budget, almost half of Russia’s pre war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life.” Lord Cameron speaking in Washington this week.
An admission that this is a proxy war, in which the “West” supplies the munitions and the Ukrainians do the dying, if ever there was one.
The review on Labour Hub of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s Towards the Abyss – Ukraine from Maidan to War is a bit sniffy at how “even handed” he is; but in examining who he is being “even handed” between allows a chink of reality into a discourse on that site that has refused to acknowledge any fissures in Ukrainian identity at all up to now.
All the previous articles self referentially quoted in this review were consistent in dismissing the people in Crimea and Donbass who rebelled against the consequences of the Maidan movement and the incorporation of Ukraine into the Western Bloc either as non existent or, at most, a minority of Russian proxies.
But in this review we do have a recognition that Ukraine did indeed “polarise” towards, in and beyond the Maidan movement; in a way self servingly summarised by pro “western” commentators as between ‘new’ Ukraine – “young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful” to the old ‘Soviet’ or ‘Russian’ outlook – “old, conservative, provincial, rigid, clinging to dying industries, poorly or inadequately educated, in bad taste, losers.” “Sovoks” as the dismissive term goes in Kyiv.
This is worth noting as the first time that this reality has been acknowledged in a Labour Hub article. Its possible that this is simply for purposes of this review, and normal service will be resumed shortly, but taking it on board is essential for any serious search for a peaceful solution that does not go by way of a massive Western escalation, with a possible nuclear component, and a (now implausible) march on Rostov on Don.
However, though the summary of the polarity in this review does not minimise the scale of it, unlike previous articles on Hub, it continues to ignore a different, more disturbing, dimension. That the largely Russian speaking, and oriented, East, was, and is, for the most part industrial working class. The Donbass, in which the war is being fought, is heavily built up, with densely packed strings of urban settlements built around mines, or strung out like heavy, gritty beads along the main roads.
The EU – and now US – oriented Ukrainian speaking West, is more agricultural; with wide open spaces with sparse villages. Look at an aeriel view. The Ukrainian nationalism nurtured there draws from deep wells of peasant suspicion of urban elites, with poisonous roots reaching back through Banderist collaboration with the Nazis (all those concentration camp guards) and beyond, to Pyet Lyura’s short lived nationalist regime at the end of World War 1; notorious for pogroms even more severe than those carried out by the White Guards during the Russian Civil War.
This has its modern day expression in influential organisations now incorporated into the Ukrianian armed forces, like the Azov battalion or the Right Sector – whose leader has been filmed saying “certain people have too much influence in Ukraine… you know, like Russians…and Jews” . Not so “metropolitan”, “cosmopolitan” or “liberal” then.
A nationalism generated in service to a greater Empire runs in the tradition of this sort of Ukrainian nationalism. First for the Habsburgs, then the Nazis, now the USA. A self image as a frontier people, “a large Israel in eastern Europe”, as President Zelensky put it. In its full fat far right form, full of suicidal self romanticism: seeing themselves as the 300 Spartans against the Asiatic hordes. A view also actively promoted within the Left by the John Bull like Ukraine Solidarity Campaign weekly bulletins that paint a picture of Russian soldiers as the sort of sub human orcs that Georgia Melloni imagines them to be. Which is why the transatlantic far right has sent so many volunteers to fight in the Donbass since 2014, a practice now getting a nod and a wink from NATO governments, with “off duty” French Foreign Legionnaires beginning to appear in casualty lists.
But perhaps not quite so self sacrificial. Units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that are effectively insourced far right militias, like the 67th Mechanised Brigade for the Right Sector and the 3rd Assault Brigade for Azov, tend to be used behind the lines to deter retreats and deserters. When put in the front lines they are developing a reputation for self preservation; with the 3rd refusing to take up what they considered to be suicidal positions in Avdiivka last month and, just this week, Chassiv Yar, while the 67th abandoned their positions there to avoid encirclement rather than seek the heroic martyrdom they advocate for others.
These are nevertheless the shock troops and guarantors of “the Ukrainian government’s decision to stick to neoliberal dogmas of privatization, lowering taxes and extreme labour deregulation, despite the objective imperatives of the war economy” as Ishchenko puts it.
But still, a polarisation. Two sides, in Ukraine. In which the tradition described by Ishchenko which celebrates the hostory that “Ukraine was crucial to the greatest social revolution and modernization breakthrough in human history. Ukraine was where some of the most significant battles of World War II took place” and in which “Millions of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in the Red Army contributed huge sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany” is actively celebrated in Donbass and Crimea; while people are arrested for expressing it in Western Ukraine. “Western” here being a term that is both geographical and political.
So, a civil war, in which the Russians are engaged with what they see as their people, and NATO is engaged with what have become their proxies. It is, indeed, innappropriate for anyone on the left to be “even handed” in a polarisation like this.
It takes a heroic act of disavowell on Labour Hub’s part to consider the economic polices outlined above to be a sovereign act by Kyiv, with the US and EU having no influence whatsoever; even though the “reconstruction plan” due to be administered by Blackrock after “victory” will take this to frenzied levels; initially conceived as a way for Western capital to carve up Ukrainian resources, with the oligarchy getting a cut, but, in the context of defeat, so the “West” can salvage what it can from the wreck of its military ambitions.
There is similar disavowell in the breezy assertion – contrary to everything the Russians said about their motivation since at least 2008 – that “Russia’s war on Ukraine had very little to do with a supposed ‘NATO threat’”. “Supposed‘NATO threat'”? Its amazing how dismissive you can be just by using an adjective and a pair of inverted commas. Perish the thought that NATO outspending the Russians on arms by more than eleven to one, expanding right up to their border and carrying out annual war games practicing to fight them could be considered a threat in Moscow.
A way to picture that is this infographic, which has the NATO tank 11 times the size of the Russian tank and therefore has the respective threats in proportion. Not something that is ever evident in the media here, nor, sadly, on Labour Hub.
The US alone spends seven and a half times as much as the Russians do. Add together all the direct US allies and they account for 67% of global military spending. They are the core of Global imperialism. The military expenditure is to secure their ongoing exploitative relationship to the rest of the world. We know that they are willing to use this, and have done. Four and a half million people have died in the “war on terror” since 2001. And President Biden is busily pushing Congress to authroise an additional $18 billion in militray aid to Israel, even as it commits its genocide in Gaza, while at the same time as cutting off aid to UNWRA to further facilitate it. so, they are not intervening in Ukraine now, and did not intervene in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution or in the Maidan movement, out of any romantic belief in the self determination of nations; quite the reverse. As Anthony Blinken put it recently, “if you’re not at the table, you’ll probably be on the menu”.
This was a war of choice by NATO. A deal guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality, autonomy for the Donbass within Ukraine, and open ended, possibly eternal, negotiations about the status of Crimea and mutual security guarantees for the whole of Europe were on the table in the Winter of 2021. That would have been a good result for everyone in Ukraine and eased tensions across Europe. NATO wouldn’t even discuss it. It is still the best outcome for the working class in Ukraine, and in the rest of Europe, and the world.
Without an even more catastrophic escalation, possibly through the Samson option foreshadowed by the UAFs recent drone attacks on the Zaporizhye nuclear power station, NATO is now heading, slowly, inexorably, towards defeat.
Continuing cheerleading for pursuit of this war pulls us all towards the “abyss” of Ishchenko’s title, but the people of Ukraine most of all.
An extraordinarily well camouflaged butterfly in a rewilding garden somewhere in Essex. Look closely and you can see its eyes and antennae.
The slogan of the Essex and Suffold water company is “living water”. In current circumstances they might want to chnage that.
One of the people I argue with on the Next Door site goes under the moniker “Brick Oboe”. I find it hard to believe that that is his actual name. It sounds like the most obscure of the seventies rock bands who named themselves after the slang for an erect dick: Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Brick Oboe.
In the distance in the playing field opposite my parents house a strange figure dressed in a pink and white hazmat suit and medical mask looks as though he is prospecting for metal, or perhaps mines; sweeping his device from one side to the other, slowly, cautiously, systematically. As he gets closer, it turns out he is mowing the grass. The PPE seems a bit extreme for that. Perhaps he has a serious grass allergy.
A week later, the whole field gets done by a tractor; which makes you wonder what the point of the bloke in the Hazmat suit was. Perahps he was just doing the irradiated grass…I take a deep sniff as I walk past for that fresh cut grass smell. A job with aromatherapy built in.
The ambulance worker in the non emergency hospital transport taking my Dad to Basildon goes to get a hospital wheelchair when we get there. This is a clunky, heavy device that looks like it was designed to carry industrial goods by a Soviet tank designer. An altogether more robust vehicle than the onboard wheelchair, which has a comfortable seat and at least the impression of suspension. He explains that the industrial design, and weight, of the hospital wheelchair is deliberate; to stop people stealing them. The long poles at the back of some of them are “to stop people getting them into cars. You’d be amazed.”
His colleague on the way back is so annoyed by the bossy recorded posh voice from the in vehicle safety monitor telling him to drive safely and do his seatbelt up that he does it up behind him and sits on it.
Listening to one of the carers chatting to my Dad about his life this morning, it struck me that carers – taken together- have a massive store of oral history about the area they work in.
Chatting to one of them, she said that she felt she had to get the job to stave off permanent boredom after moving to Purfleet from Central London. “Its so QUIET in Purfleet”.
As the stair lift is Dutch, perhaps the music to accompany an ascent should be the Flying Dutchman Overture. The chair goes slowly enough to get quite a way into it.
On the way back from the pharmacy back in NW9, a battered looking yellow football bounces down the path from the estate on Stagg Lane heading swiftly towards the road. I swing my gammy leg towards it and, in a miracle of luck, my dyspraxic slice at the ball conjures up a magnificent banana shot that takes it safely back into the estate and behind the hedge.
The first point that we have to be clear about is that we are now in a period of damage limitation. Continued emissions of greenhouse gases are putting humanity well behind the curve of saving ourselves from the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for the survival of human civilisation. In the current relationship of forces, the question is not whether we can avoid the crisis, but how much damage we can avoid. As we need far more dramatic shifts that current political and economic relations allow, we have to seize and build on any and every change that is immediately possible in order to bank it – limit the damage – and build on it to have any prospect of breaking through the limits of those conditions. It is imperative to do both.
The paradox is that fossil fuel interests are now under such a threat from the transition that is already taking place, even at its current slow pace, that they are putting significant resources into political movements that are either denialist, like Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, or go slow, like Sunak. The dynamic of this is towards denialism; in practice if not in theory. This dovetails with the impasse of neoliberalism, which requires a dramatic shift in the balance of power against the working class and Global South to restore profitability and capital formation in the US allied countries. This tends towards fascism; because “normal” politics will be incapable of imposing that scale of defeat required. The question here is not whether Trump, for example, is a fascist, but whether the movement he fronts up (and which is an expression of very powerful class forces) is heading in that direction. This tendency is not inevitable, but has to be seen for what it is. As the inequality of wealth, and stratospheric concentration among the wealthiest has increased, political acceptance of democratic constraints among the wealthiest has declined sharply. Resistance to this is one of the motors of transformation.
Fascism is a last resort for ruling classes because it is ultimately suicidal, requires exponential escalation of confrontation to a point of total victory or total defeat: but the prospect of ecological collapse makes this less of an inhibition in a kind of last days of Nazi Berlin recklessness; and generates the sort of exuberantly self indulgent celebration of irrationality that is such a feature of movements like MAGA.
The capitalist class is divided on climate, however. Significant capital is going into renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other key transition sectors. Others are perturbed about the future, and want there to be one. We should note that there was a significant participation from private school students in the climate strikes for example. If you expect the world to be your oyster, then find out it is going to hell in a handcart, you’re going to be upset about it. It is also noticeable that the active cadre of climate denialism in the Global Warming Policy Foundation are not only rich enough to be part of the global 1%, they are also almost entirely over 70 years old. Lord Lawson, of course, is already dead.
This division also plays out not simply in “green sector” businesses, among scientists and academia, but also at different levels in government. Cities are vital laboratories for a green social shift. The C40 movement, the most important legacy of the Livingstone Mayoralty in my view, knits together the Mayors of nearly 100 of the world’s biggest cities from New York to London to Jakarta to Beijing, Paris and Buenos Aires. All of them are working on ways to green construction, transport, urban planning, waste and recycling; and sharing the results in a vast process of mutual experimentation and shared learning. You can read about that here. The need to make such a conscious shift in every aspect of life is a new challenge and no one has all the answers. We are making it up as we go along, and any and every lever we have any access to is vital. Every small step that works is a seed, because it shows what might be done on a bigger scale. These cities cover a multitude of political sins, and at present it could not be otherwise. And they make a big contribution to the Paris process. Actions taken by US cities aligned with C40, and to some extent States, reduced the impact of Trump’s rollback on climate measures during his last Presidency by about half. Whatever the political character, and limitations, of the Mayors of NY and LA and the other cities involved, this is essential work. This could be seen as an application of Gramsci’s notion that we are in a war of position, seeking to gain ground in a myriad of social forms and organisations as part of the process of shifting hegemony towards a point that the old unsustainable order cracks.
Nevertheless, pro Net Zero views among capitalists tends to a kind of techno Micawberism – the view that technological changes alone, leaving existing social and economic structures intact – will be enough. Given the studies by Oxfam and others that show that the carbon emissions of the wealthiest 10% will, at current consumption rates, take us beyond 1.5C on their own, regardless of what the rest of us do, this poses the limits of any bloc with them, and also a rule of thumb guideline for how much income is too much in global terms; roughly anything above £75,000 per person at the moment. For people above this, getting to sustainability will be harder than a camel threading a needle, but there we are. We can travel to sustainability, but not in private jets or yachts.
The climate movement is necessarily broad. We should be prepared for united fronts across wide disagreements on other matters and to have debates within the movement; and also form blocs with different class forces on particular issues without doing so on their terms. Offshore wind companies, for example, are as ruthless to their workers as any others. This is a contradiction that we have to fight out within the imperative to have as many of them built as we can.
The same applies to limited and inadequate political choices which reflect capitalist interests first and human imperatives a long way below. A continued Biden Presidency, for example, would continue to pursue an “America First” green transition, as well as its global war drive against China, arming the IDF assault on Gaza, channeling capital into military spending and sucking green investment away from even its subordinate allies. A Trump Presidency would make the US a complete rogue state on climate, smash up the Paris process, double down on fossil fuels, and spice up the war drive with what Boris Johnson calls “unpredictable violence”. Leon Trotsky’s argument in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany –that when you are confronted by two people who are going to kill you, but one has a gun and the other some slow poison, you bloc with the poisoner against the gunman, while building up your own forces so you can deal with the poisoner later – is relevant to this.
Either way, the dominant ruling class in the US centred Global North bloc, for all its protestations of global leadership, will not lead humanity into sustainability. The ease with which they have found billions for wars, and now escalating military spending, compares starkly with the difficulty they seem to have providing climate finance for the Global South.
The ideologues of the world’s imperial core have warned us of what they are going to do. In “The Age of Consequences” a projection of potential climate scenarios drawn up by allies of Al Gore in the US Democrat Party in 2008 stated quite clearly that in conditions in which climate driven “massive non linear events” began to unravel societies, “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage, deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad but at home.” When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
This is not simply a question of a confrontation with capitalism, it is a question of confronting imperialism in the first instance. The concentration of the major imperial powers into a US led Global North bloc – described by the Tricontinental Institute as Hyper Imperialism– is the last stand of an order that extracts wealth from the rest of the world, seeks to make its own working classes complicit in doing so, is arming itself to the teeth to confront the consequences of its failure to deal with the climate crisis; and is risking war rather than peacefully come to terms with China becoming economically weightier than the US, thereby accepting multipolarity. This means that we may not live long enough to experience the full consequences of climate breakdown, should the kind of US strategic thinkers advocating a war with China in the next five years manage to provoke one. If we manage to avert this – and it will take efforts on our part – the diversion of investment into military spending will cut essential investment in climate transition and do enormous and unnecessary damage anyway. We won’t get this time back.
John Bellamy Foster’s call for an anti imperialist climate movement to address the twin threats of 21st Century exterminism, the US war drive and climate breakdown, is essential, in that there needs to be clarity on this on the Left, but also insufficient, in that there need to be united fronts with forces that are not on the Left, and forces on the Left that don’t see themselves as anti imperialist in the way that Bellamy Foster (or I) would; and this is a dynamic process.
The role of the countries that see themselves as Socialist is a more positive one than they are usually given credit for in the climate and labour movements in the Global North. Whether this is Cuba being considered a sustainability model by the UN, or China investing twice as much in energy transition as the US and EU put together this year, or high speed rail investments as part of the Belt and Road initiative. This is examined in some detail here. I use the phrase “countries that see themselves as Socialist” because large parts of the Left in the Global North don’t think that these countries are what they think Socialism is, but its important to take on board the fact that 90 million Chinese Communist Party members disagree with them – and that should pose (at least) a debate, with them, not about them. A good place to start getting a flavour of their views, and that of quite a broad range of the non Party Left is Wenhua Zongheng.
Monthly Review has also made a serious reassessment of the Soviet Union’s ecological record, stressing that the ecological disasters, for which it is well known, generated a significant environmental movement, and big shifts in state policy with real impacts, particularly in the 1980s after Chernobyl; and that its overall environmental impact was no worse than that of the US. Anyone who has seen post industrial wastelands in the US will not find that hard to believe.
The current escalation of extreme weather events is just the overture to impacts that will, on current trajectories, become locally or regionally unmanageable in the coming decades; posing political climate emergencies declared by local ruling classes seeking to survive at everyone else’s expense, confronting working class and popular resistance, forced into revolutionary solutions to seek survival. Developments of this sort can’t help but have a dramatic political ripple effect, transforming debate and actions globally. Columbian President Petro’s insight that Gaza is a dress rehearsal for what the Global North will increasingly impose on the rest of the world as the climate breaks down should also be seen as a promise of the sort of global solidarity it has generated. with the sharp political learning curve, shake up and shake down of allegiances and organisations that goes with it. As Bellamy Foster puts it; “A revolt by the world’s environmental proletariat …, in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will inevitably take part, is destined to come about in the coming decades as a result of the struggle for ecological survival.”
We are the majority and should act to mobilise it. When Just Stop Oil in the UK says “We need a revolution”, they are proposing a combination of continued non violent direct actions with assemblies to mobilise local communities around matters of concern. We should not be formulaic about what forms “assemblies” should take; as they will necessarily be multiple and will obviously include workplaces; and in some cases, these will be the core of a wider social mobilisation, as they are at GKN Firenze.
We should also be clear that any NVDA must be directed at appropriate targets and all actions be aimed at mobilising the majority opinion in favour of more urgent climate action, not substituting for that in ways that provide climate deniers with a popular stick to beat us with. JSO has not always been sensitive to that. Nevertheless, initiatives like this are part of the war of position. Revolutions, and counter revolutions, take place when a social order breaks down to a point that it can no longer go on. That is when the war of position becomes a war of manoeuvre and ecological breakdown or economic impasse or military confrontations can all be causes of that. (See point 13 above).
In the UK, the biggest wave of climate activism, and optimism, coincided with the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, which held out the prospect of a UK government that would qualitatively up the investment in green transition. This fed off, and fed, a series of mass movements outside Parliament and Parliamentary thinking that nevertheless led to Parliament declaring a climate emergency and embedded concern for climate as a top 4 issue ever since.
A Parliamentary Road to Sustainability now looks too long and winding to get to its destination anything like fast enough; with the level of investment being proposed by Labour quantitatively better than that already in place, but not to the qualitative degree we need. This is a damaging and retrograde choice by the Labour leadership. The failure of economic logic is examined here. Sir Nicholas Stern and others at the Grantham Institute have also demonstrated that the UK needs at least 1% of GDP to be invested in infrastructure every year to keep abreast of other developed countries. 1% of GDP is £26 billion. Which is a familiar sounding figure. Anything short of that allows continued decay.
Rachel Reeves recent Mais lecture got the relationship between climate transition and “growth” completely the wrong way round; with the notion that any investment in green transition will flow from “growth” in the existing economy; within the framework of restrictive fiscal rules and respecting Tory spending plans that have baked in another five years of austerity. Reeves argues that Labour will aim to “grow the pie”, addressing issues of productivity with selective state pump priming. The scale of this is the problem. Cutting planned investment from £28 billion a year to only a little over what the Conservatives have already pencilled in, means that few pumps will be primed. Even with a “growth unit” in the Treasury, there will therefore be little growth, because there won’t be enough investment to generate it; and what growth there will be will primarily reproduce existing patterns of unsustainable production and consumption, not the sharp shift in the economy to a much lower carbon intensity overall that we need. Its not so much that the pie needs to be bigger, but it does need better, more nutritious ingredients, and to be shared qualitatively more equitably. That follows the climate imperative to reduce the overconsumption of the richest 10% outlined above. But Reeves’s approach rejects social redistribution, with all but the most limited taxes on the wealthy ruled out. We should not accept the poverty of low aspirations that passes for “realism” in Labour leadership circles and push for what is realistically necessary.
“Growth” in the sense that Reeves poses it, is a way to generate benefits without confronting unsustainable inequalities of wealth and power; leaving them intact. Without differentiating between what is sustainable and what is not. “A rising tide lifts all boats”, but in current conditions, it also drowns all coastal cities.
However, “degrowth” is not a good description of what we are trying to do; all too easily translated, in current circumstances, as “austerity”, or an unjust transition requiring the 90% to pay the price for the continued indulgence of the wealthiest 10%. Growth is completely legitimate and necessary in the developing world. The importance of a massive shift in investment to it is to enable this to happen without reliance on outmoded fossil fuel technology, in the same way that Africa has leapfrogged landlines to use Satphones. The failure of the Washington Consensus finance structure to make this finance available is structural and condemns the majority world to continued poverty and a pattern of development that is slow and unsustainable. In the Global North our movement has to be about transformation and regeneration, lowering carbon intensity without crashing majority living standards.
The US bloc is trying to unravel globalisation, as it no longer provides it with global dominance. In cutting the world economy into parts, it breaks up shared efficiencies of scale, making all progress towards sustainability more costly. Local production is not always better than working with a global division of labour, and is often less so, even when transport costs are taken into account.
“Extractivism” is also not a useful formulation, as, if we are to make anything at all, we need the raw materials to construct it; and that involves mining, refining and so on. The point here is to have the most economic – sparing – use of these materials, including the most effective possible circular reuse; and the best possible terms and conditions for the workers employed in the global supply chains; which is part of increasing the living standards of workers across the world as we head for sustainability.
The food metaphors used in this discussion are unfortunate as, given the choice, most people would go for a fat pie over a thin doughnut.
It is a statement of the obvious that, if we are to survive, some sectors of the economy have to shrink dramatically and, in some cases disappear, while others have to expand while the overall carbon intensity of everything made or done has to decrease. That requires continued technological innovation. We can’t presume a magic bullet, and can’t afford to wait for one, but at present there is a 2% annual improvement in efficiency and, according to the IEA, that needs to double to get us on track. That needs investment and coordination. So, the transition is necessarily technologically intense. The figures from the study that drew up maximum sustainable per capita energy consumption in Jonathan Essex’s recent article on the Greener Jobs Alliance blog were based on a presumption of everyone having equal access to the most advanced technology available. This is a long way from “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” but the technological dimension of maintaining a decent and sustainable way of life will be huge (and require the commensurate level of skills to sustain it).
At present in the UK, even with stagnant “growth” in the conventional sense, and a transition that is going too slow, the number of jobs being created in “green” sectors is greater than those being lost in carbon heavy sectors.According to the ONS, in 2022, 8,500 jobs were lost in oil and gas, while 40,000 were created in low carbon and renewable energy sectors (almost 5 gained for every one lost). But, they are different jobs in different places. All investment, transition related or not, tends to substitute capital for labour, so transition for workers in threatened sectors must be addressed by any government, or movement, serious about making a shift with public support and avoid devastating local impacts like that at Port Talbot. Our movement should be about anticipating those shifts and for the unions and communities concerned to be ahead of what’s coming to make the appropriate demands for job guarantees, retraining and redeployment. If that does not happen, we end up in the ridiculous position whereby unions representing North Sea Oil and Gas workers campaign against the freeze on new exploration proposed by Labour, even though this is contrary to the interests of the working class as a whole.
If you go to the TUC HQ in London, there is a magnificent painting by Dan Jones of the demonstration outside Pentonville prison in 1972 that was the strongest expression of the General Strike that freed the Pentonville 5. If you look at the banners being carried, most of them are from unions and union organisations that no longer exist. SOGAT. The Port of London Joint Shop Stewards Committee etc. This should stand as a warning to us today. A trade unionism that limits itself to bread and butter issues and the immediate perceived interests of members confines itself to trying to get a better deal in someone else’s world; and leaves strategic decisions about the future in the hands of a ruling class that will make them in a self interested way that will destroy whole sections of our movement. This is trade unionism that Gramsci would have described as “subaltern” and “corporate”. Another way to put it is that it is trade unionism that, however militant, ultimately knows its place.
We need, instead, to push for Just Transition bodies at every level, in every sector and in every community; and push for a government that could, for example, approach the highly skilled workers making private jets and ask them, “with your skills, and this kit, what could you make instead that would benefit everyone?” and coordinates all initiatives through a National Climate Service. There are vast reservoirs of creativity, imagination and preparedness for hard work that could be harnessed in a universally understood human mission to save ourselves.
Article 12 of Paris Agreement states that all signatories have to educate their populations on the nature of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. We should not interpret that as a sectoral point, but as a whole society obligation whereby society mobilises itself to deal with the crisis. Our movement has to lead that, or it won’t happen.
Urban ramblings 