Rising Above the Thinking that Created the Climate Crisis
As a clear and present threat to humanity, the climate crisis is far too broad a problem to be treated in its totality in the space of a short essay. We might however aim at more effectively framing further enquiry; it is the right questions that spurs it after all, while attachment to right answers is a deadening influence, and those who imagine they have all the answers tend to have not much of a clue as the question. The essay that follows proposes Einstein’s observations as to the impossibility of treating a problem using the thinking that created it as the basis for a crucial framing of the climate crisis—namely, how do we define that thinking, and how do we start to think about rising above it? The climate crisis is a problem to which Einstein’s maxim applies as much as any other; the truth of his maxim applies to the climate crisis with a greater urgency than all else.
Towards defining the problem
Taking their lead from Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, an increasing number of scientists now argue that the geological epoch following on from the end of the Holocene can be described in terms of the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. The importance of establishing the current epoch as one dominated by the influence of activity has been and is vital in appreciating the profundity of changes taking place to the natural environment as the direct result of the burning of fossil fuels, and so of the dire existential threat presented to all life on Earth by the climate crisis. By the same token, how much does the Anthropocene, in and of itself tell is about where the climate crisis came from? If we are to rise above the thinking that created it, surely this is the next question that we should be asking.
We find here that we start running into trouble. Many, like Jeremy Davies in The Birth of the Anthropocene, point to the industrial revolution as the point where the effects of human activity began to make their epoch-defining impacts on the natural environment. They are certainly not far wrong—but if this is the end of the story, the only conclusion can be that human nature is by definition evil, and that human society was doomed from its earliest moments to become the victim of what was apparently its own characteristic avarice and myopia. Not only is this a generally unsatisfactory explanation for complex historical phenomena spanning hundreds of years, it also places equal culpability for the climate crisis on extractivist European colonialists and their racialized victims, on Bangladeshi peasants and the executive boards of multinational petroleum conglomerates. On this count, putting the root cause of the climate crisis down to human nature makes even less sense.
As Swedish geographer Andreas Malm has pointed out, on the other hand, one of the major reasons why early industrialists opted for steam power, rather than water-driven cotton mills in rural settings close to rivers, was because of the possibilities doing so afford them for relocating to urban centres with a high population of surplus labour. By concentrating workers in large urban centres where a mass of unemployed would tilt the balance of power ever more heavily between capital and labour in the favour of the former, Malm reveals, industrialists could break the class power of organised mill workers, impose ever more autocratic labour discipline and in so doing increased their own class power. In this style, Malm argues, fossil fuels were crucial to the rise of industrial capitalism—a perspective supported in reflecting on the fact that, today, the single greatest consumer of fossil fuels (and so also the greatest single contributor to global warming) is the U.S. military.
In reflecting on the role of imperialist U.S. military aggression around the world over the last century, and in the last two decades in particular, the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and what Madison referred to as the defence of ‘the minority of the opulent against the majority’ is not especially hard to decipher. The fact that the Anthropocene has developed within a historical context of a class-divided world, however, exposes the limitations of blaming human nature for the actions of industrial capitalists. In putting the question of the climate crisis on a more solid historical foundation in this way, we immediately have much greater hope of identifying the thinking that produced it, and so strategies for rising above that thinking.
Bringing in class to environmental history
While we can certainly trace our collective fossil fuel addiction to the industrial revolution and the lead taken by industrial elites in adopting it as a means, amongst other things, of cementing their class power, did the industrial revolution itself fall out of the sky? Hardly. If the industrial revolution itself had a historical context, then the issue of the origins of the climate crisis, and the importance of understanding the precise nature of those origins to understanding the thinking that produced it, is an issue of understanding the origins of the industrial revolution.
To properly appreciate the environmental history behind the origins of the industrial revolution to understand the thinking that produced the climate crisis, we must understand the industrial revolution as a historical moment when the process of private accumulation began to move under its own momentum—something that had not always been the case. To start any new business venture, we need to source start-up capital; the same also held true where the system of private accumulation as such was concerned. In economic history, the process of sourcing start-up capital to launch the capitalist system as such is known as primitive accumulation; in social history, primitive accumulation takes a variety of forms, colonialism being the principle one.
It is a statement of the obvious, given the violent history of European colonialism, that hunters of start-up capital for the system of private accumulation did not put on formal business attire, go to the nearest bank, fill out the necessary forms, and ask nicely. They took what they wanted by force. We find the history of colonialism characterised then by brutal wars of conquest, land theft, resource theft, slavery and innumerable other human rights violations. It was not for nothing that Marx remarked that ‘capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’ This is a fact with which we are well acquainted in a settler-colony like Australia, and one that appears to account to no small extent for the virulent racism and bigotry that continues to dog us.
We return to the issue of racism and bigotry presently. In the meantime, the issue of colonialism in providing impetus to the forces that bequeathed the industrial revolution, an industrial capitalism addicted at birth to fossil fuels, and the climate crisis, begs the question as to the origins of colonialism. Exploring this question leads us directly back in fact to Othering, and so to racism and bigotry, for reasons that, in becoming clearer, highlight the bearing of this line of enquiry has on the broader themes under scrutiny. The question of the origins of colonialism leads us to the work of feminist historian Silvia Federici, whose seminal work on the European Witch Hunts demonstrates their function as a means of suppressing a rebellious peasantry lately freed from feudal bonds by a combination of systemic decline and pandemic, pursing paths of social and economic development based around the Commons threatening to the vested interests of European elites.
A 300-year-long campaign of theocratic terror, the European Witch Hunts enabled elites to salvage class privilege from the decline of Feudalism. In that respect, as Federici again shows, the Witch Hunts constituted a form of class warfare that served to defend the indefensible through the age-old strategy of divide-and-conquer—in this iteration, on the basis of a patriarchal mythology based on the allegedly wanton nature of female sexuality. Such was the basis for a conspiracy theory revolving around ‘Brides of Satan’ who had been tempted into sin by the Deceiver, alleged to be responsible for the social catastrophes associated with Feudal decline. Not least of such was the Black Plague, which wiped out half of Europe, tilting the balance of class power in favour of the labouring peasantry. The witchcraft conspiracy theory cast societal chaos, for which no religious explanation was readily apparent otherwise, part of God’s plan, and the attendant sufferings divine punishments for sin, predictably defined in terms of rebelliousness (or perhaps better yet lack of deference to theocratic authority with the requisite level of awe).
Federici’s work leads directly into the origins of colonialism in developing the theme of ‘Othering,’ or demonising of a group targeted for scapegoating and persecution as a vilified and stereotyped ‘Other’ (cast as a binary opposite to the Self). Federici examines the Othering implicit in the Witchcraft conspiracy theory, comparing it to the Othering associated with the portrayal of indigenous peoples in countries targeted for colonial exploitation as ‘savages’ and ‘heathens’ in need of civilising by allegedly Christian Europeans. On this count, her work aligns with the major contribution from Edward Said examining representation of the Other as a legitimising narrative for colonialism in the form of Orientalism, ‘Othering’ in this case being a technique for imposing the incipient global system that would eventually spawn the climate crisis.
Orientalism, Said argued, referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power). As Federici’s work illustrated, the Orientalist mentality was adaptable to gender as well. Where women folk healers from amongst the European peasantry were demonised and Othered as witches on the basis of the challenge they presented to theocratic patriarchy, so too were indigenous peoples in colonised lands Othered as savages simply for being in the way of extractivism and European lusting after start-up or ‘first’ capital. Orientalism, racism, misogyny and colonialism would, in this manner, become inextricably tied into the origins of the climate crisis.
Racism, Misogyny, Othering and the ‘Capitalocene’
The historical role of racism and othering can be gathered principally then in terms of their usefulness in greasing the cogs of primitive accumulation, or the class warfare inherent to gathering of ‘first capital’ in colonialism. This process, completed with the arrival of the industrial revolution, contrasts with commentary in the Communist Manifesto speaking of the feudal relations of property being ‘no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces’ and so ‘burst asunder; they were burst asunder.’ Rather than reflecting alleged iron laws of development, primitive accumulation indicates in fact a very conscious and concerted campaign of class warfare to break down resistance to the dominance of global capital—enabled in the final analysis by racism, misogyny and other forms of Othering necessary for legitimising rationales and then scapegoating the victims.
The fact that this campaign was so conscious and concerted, and can be linked with the thrust to class domination closely tied to the rise to global dominance of capitalism, justifies the concept of ‘Capitalocene’—not so much a historical epoch dominated by humans per se, but one dominated by humans consumed by avarice and addiction to fossil fuels. In building on scientific arguments regarding the Anthropocene and the depths of human impacts on the natural environment, the Capitalocene is crucial to locating climate change historically, within the rise to dominance of capitalist relations of production. Within the Capitalocene, more specifically, climate change is understood historically to be the inevitable product of the predatory tendency inherent to capitalism to see workers, women, the peoples of the global South, the flora and fauna and finally the planet itself as objects whose sole value is exploitation for profit. From this predatory view in turn derives the instrumentalist and reductionistic mentality that the Earth in an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump.
Two associated and mutually reinforcing trends within the Capitalocene, then, are apparent—trends through which we can zero in on the thinking that underpins the climate crisis and in which it feeds. On the one hand, we find the mentality that regards the Earth in an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump. On the other, we have the Othering necessary to maintain the legitimising pretexts upon which the regime of private accumulation was built, and upon which it continues to rely. The two conjoin in the mentality that the Earth exists to serve global capital and anyone who finds themselves in the way only has themselves to blame. Crisis then can be understood only in terms of crises of accumulation; the traditional blaming of the victims for being in the way extrapolated then into full-blown conspiracy theories to serve the purposes of geopolitical crisis management.
With the history of the European Witch Hunts as precedent, elite-driven conspiracy theories within the Capitalocene must, as a matter of definition, blame those in the way of capital accumulation for existing; they must create problems to which they then style themselves the solution. As US artist Jenny Holzer noted, private property created crime. Elite-driven narratives then reflexively conflate the interests of humanity and the interests of global capital, associating those in the way with a conspiracy to undermine and destroy global society, just as their habitual tendency to regard the Earth in an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump achieves the same outcome in fact.
Constructed crisis as Capitalocenic crisis management
Crisis management through panic-driven scapegoating as an epochal feature of the Capitalocene was revealed in unusually overt fashion on 15 March 2019, when global student protests against climate change and the Christchurch Massacre perpetrated by Australian Brendan Tarrant took place simultaneously. The glaring contrast between global student climate strikes and a gun massacre as responses to crisis highlighted with unusual clarity the contradictory way of conceptualising it within the Capitalocene; anthropologist Ghassan Hage, in a work aptly entitled Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017), explicitly links the kind of racism the Christchurch massacre symbolised to a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change. In so doing, he points to a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he calls ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ modes—the ‘savage’ being that of the primitive accumulation during the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was that commonly associated with modern liberal democracy.
This oscillating tendency, Hage proposes, reflects in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that primitive accumulation remained an ongoing process even after capitalism had reached a late stage, as it has now. This was especially true insofar as global capitalism continues to be plagued by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and by democratic challenges from below—crises, in other words, of accumulation. This drives the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, Hage argued, as elites return to violence to rescue class privilege from the social and environmental consequences of maintaining class-divided societies, or from democratic upsurges from below in response to those consequences, or both.
Besides threatening all life on Earth, in other words, the great problem of the climate crisis is its tendency to awaken a need for profound social change amongst increasing parts of the world’s population, increasingly presents a clear and present threats to elite privilege as scientific fact and lived daily experience infringe on the Orientalist ideological mores that has upheld a world order of haves and have nots, built on colonialism, for 500 years. Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth, then, appear necessary as a stopgap against crisis. As if to demonstrate, Brendan Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto, The Great Replacement, referenced a far-right conspiracy theory holding that white genocide was being engineered by naive liberals advocating mass migration and cultural diversity. Tarrant’s identification of failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy with the destruction of white society reflected classic Orientalist definitions of crisis as threats, actual or perceived, to the global legacy of colonialism.
The Orientalist roots of this kind of conspiratorial paranoia is supported by sociological research into moral panics, as is the documented tendency of corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering (Herman and Chomsky). Tarrant’s Islamic bugbears were disseminated directly through the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse. Constructing deviance in this way was crucial to the legitimation in the West of conflicts we initiated as a result of addiction to fossil fuels, as in the case of Iraq, or meddling in conflicts wrought in part by the effects of climate change, as in the case of Syria. In both cases, the power of the corporate media to manufacture consent through scare-driven Othering informed by Orientalist discourse was reflected in the double standards applied to terrorism, demonising the violence of the weak and brown-skinned, and giving the state violence of white western imperialists a free pass.
In the case of the Terror Scare, or what in ideological parlance is generally referred to as the War on Terror, the thinking that produced the climate crisis was rolled out to save its perpetrators from their consequences, be they fuel addiction amongst finite global reserves, the Mesopotamian drought that drove Syrian farmers into cities like Aleppo to begin the popular ferment that lead to the Arab Spring, or the fact that Islamic State, who had not existed prior to the US invasion of Iraq, became a major antagonist in the Syrian conflict. Having been shoved down the throats of the global public with the aid of moral panic over terrorism, the Orientalist legacy of the dead generations continues to weigh like a nightmare over the minds of the living—the perpetrator of the Christchurch Massacre being not the least of whom.
Conclusion
Returning in light of the above discussion to Einstein’s original observations regarding the impossibility of solving a problem using the thinking that created it, it is fair to conclude that the contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and the scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects the function of the former in constructing scapegoats for the latter. As Hage notes, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. Accumulation crisis rooted increasingly in the economic effects of climate crisis drives the scapegoating dynamic of ‘savage’ capitalism built on a white victim complex that reflexively conflates respecting other cultures and death of the Self. The terror inherent to atrocities like Christchurch only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.
This contrast also serves as the basis for defining the thinking that bequeathed to us the climate crisis. We start to think about how to rise above that thinking in recognising the core culpability of capitalism for climate change as a historical process, and climate change is the product of capitalist social relations along with it. As a direct consequence, we can only conclude then that, to forestall the impossibility of trying to solve problems using the thinking that created them as per Einstein, we must develop new social relations predicated on valuing the inherent worth of workers, women, people of the Global South, the flora and fauna and ultimately the planet itself. Rather than instrumentalising them in service to abstract tenets of economic dogma and political ideology, in general destruction of rights, wellbeing and life, dogma and ideology must be jettisoned such that political thinking and production and distribution serve individual rights and welfare.
In the final analysis, and as the foundation of strategy, this amounts to the abolition of hierarchy in all forms, public or private, and of all forms of economic and social privilege that give rise to them in the first place. Understanding the roots of the climate crisis in the predatory mentality that the Earth in an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump, and of the Capitalocene as its historical location, is, to one degree or another, the basis for various endeavours in Eco-Socialism, Social Ecology and World-Ecology and informs efforts at combatting the climate crisis without replicating the hierarchical modalities that produced it, by developing new social relations within the shell of the old. If there is no class privilege on a dead planet, then there can no class society either, and therefore no hierarchy based on class or any other social privileges used to divide subject classes amongst ourselves. If the Capitalocene was born of the fracturing of humanity on the basis of class and social privilege, putting it back together by transcending privilege and hierarchy, prioritising personal growth over economic, must be the main order of business then in overcoming the thinking that created the problem in the first place.
Ben Debney is a doctoral candidate in History at Western Sydney University, Bankstown. The working title of his thesis is ‘Origins and Outcomes of Capital Accumulation in the Climate Crisis.’
