Should NZ Left lean into polarization? Smug climate certainty isn’t enough

COP29 has been a total failure:

Oxfam Says COP29 Deal Is A “Global Ponzi Scheme” – Oxfam Aotearoa

COP29 ‘bandaid over a bullet wound’, polluters should expect resistance – Greenpeace

The obligations are meaningless and do not in any way protect us from what is coming, nor does it make real momentum for adaptation.

The entire process has now been taken over by the polluter interests against the common good.

This is Capitalism at its worst.

I just believe at this stage we are in an age of consequences, that the extreme nature of what is coming our way will splinter the political spectrum.

There is going to need to be a very different kind of politics and a very different kind of economy, society and culture required to be able to adapt fast enough for the climate realities coming.

The ugly truth is we will be forced to change whether we want to or not now because the speed of biosphere shut down and the enormous immediate changes they will wreck will literally force us to change.

It’s only a matter of time now.

The elites WANT a culture war.
The elites WANT a race war.
The elites are AFRAID of class war.
The elites are AFRAID of solidarity.

Should NZ Left lean into polarization because I don’t think smug climate certainty is enough.

ACT, NZF and National are Climate Fascists who have done everything to bend over backwards for the interests of the polluters at a time when global warming can no longer be portrayed as a socialist hoax.

The disconnect between the bribed Political class and their polluter donors vs the people living with the realities of climate change is beyond the current political spectrum and I can only see more mass civil disobedience or the rise of eco terrorism.

As the speed of climate change hits us, as the true cost of our denial is realised – protestors will get angrier and angrier at the inaction.

Sometimes the machine is so hateful and evil you have to throw yourself onto the gears to stop it.

…the recent report on sea warming is so fucking grim and I think pretending shit is going to get better if we recycle, ride a bike and become carbon neutral by 2050 is nothing more than vacant optimism…

I just don’t think the vast majority of Kiwis have any comprehension yet just how bad things are going to get from a purely scientific point of view.

Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.

Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!

They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!

National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!

The economic research tells us that our economic future is not more dairy and cheap exports to China and the environmental research tells us we are running out of time…

How climate change will make your life more expensive

The impacts of climate change extend beyond the environment – global warming is also hitting people in their wallets.

From rising insurance premiums to increased energy bills and grocery prices, the economic impacts are wide-ranging. The financial burden of climate change also has the potential to infiltrate our finances in other, more subtle ways.

Here’s how the warming planet could significantly drive up day-to-day costs.

…the vested interests of the polluter class dictate National, NZF and ACT policy. Working within that system will do nothing.

Only mass civil disobedience will revoke the polluters influence.

As we reel from the scale of a Trump win, Richard Seymour is an ecoMarxist who is pointing out that despite climate deniers being hit by storms caused by climate denial, they refuse to connect the experience to a wider understanding of the consequences and causes…

‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis

In his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, the Marxist thinker explores how extremist movements around the world seek to blame fictional enemies for real disasters

he is, arguably, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on the politics of climate breakdown and nature loss. In his regular Patreon and podcast appearances, Seymour – who is clearly something of a polymath – effortlessly joins the dots between environmental collapse, the rise of the far right and the role our desires play in a crumbling world, all while retaining his Marxist roots. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm asks on the front cover of Seymour’s new book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, “What thinker would you bring to an Earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home.”

Our emotional responses to the world around us is one of the things that interests Seymour most. When we meet in the British Library to talk about his latest work, it’s this theme we keep circling back to.

Comparing the success of the far right in India, Brazil and the US (among other places), Seymour argues that most explanations for their rise are insufficient. What we’re seeing is “too consistent over time and too global, to be explained by local factors such as the backlash of a fading white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading disinformation,” he writes. These movements also don’t have the hallmarks of historical fascism. “Their immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy,” Seymour observes, but “a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and ‘woke’ constraints on the exercise of power.” While the old establishment decomposes, the far right conjures up apocalyptic images – “the great replacement”, “Islamisation”, “Chinese-style communism” – to animate potential supporters. This is not yet a distinct form of fascism; instead, it is what Seymour calls “disaster nationalism”.

An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters?

If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. “It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.”

Applying a psychoanalytic lens, as the American writer Tad DeLay does too, Seymour avoids commonplace and often sympathy-tinged characterisations of the far right as a cry of the working class (the “left behind”). The economy matters somewhat – he says a trajectory of decline fuels many middle-class people’s radicalisation to the right – but the roots of these movements often aren’t proletarian.

“All of these formations start off with a fairly middle-class voter base,” he tells me. “That’s certainly true of Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi, and after a term in office, they have begun to build a real cross-class coalition, which is incredible.”

Anyone familiar with Seymour’s writing will know that he takes racism, sexism and transphobia seriously. When we talk, he speaks about these forms of bigotry with the same sophistication he brings to his writing and manages to do so while forgoing one of the other mainstream explanations of the far right’s rise, where voters are dismissed as gullible idiots who need to be shown the error of their ways – and of their information sources.

“If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition,” he writes in Disaster Nationalism.

And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame.

Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high. As the fires rage, people refuse to leave, Seymour notes, so they can physically protect where they live from the arsonists they believe are behind all of this.

Ecological disaster transforms into disaster created by human evil; the climate crisis turns into a crisis of interpersonal rivalry, aggression and victimhood. The destruction of the planet creates the structural conditions for these ideas but it wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t already circulating, Seymour argues.

And he’s clear on why they’re so effective. “You can’t shoot climate change, you can’t take it to court, the same thing with capitalism. These are big, abstract forces, and you feel kind of hopeless against them,” he says. It’s far more attractive, exciting even, to “attack a personalised enemy”. All of us are susceptible to this, Seymour maintains – “There’s jackboots for all of us”, he reminds me at the end of our interview – albeit not equally.

…we might have believed that the climate catastrophe would force people to reflect, but of course they won’t.

As the climate gets progressively worse and more extreme, those denying it will become more unhinged and more sucked into conspiracy theories spread by social media hate algorithms.

I believed once upon a time that people would see the catastrophic climate change and realise free market capitalism got it wrong and that they would turn to the Left, but more and more I’m realising that climate change will hit the misguided and the ignorant far worse because they will on the one hand be denying the link between the weather event they are experiencing and the vested interests of the polluters and will instead manufacture a whole new crazy conspiracy to understand it.

The Left has to counter the negative populism of the Right with positive populism – taxing the 1% for free public services and punishing the polluters to make them pay for climate change adaptation IS the populism that the Left needs to lean into.

 

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