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Building a movement against Climate Change

Roy Wilkes

THERE IS an objective urgency to the climate issue that impacts directly on social consciousness, and which helps us to define some aspects of the movement we seek to build.

First and foremost that movement needs to be global, since carbon emissions do not respect national boundaries.

One of the most positive aspects of the leadership of the Campaign against Climate Change is that it understands this and is working to build just such a global movement, linking up the campaigns around the world and helping to set up new ones, including in the South, (although usually in alliance with NGOs, which is something of a weakness.)

And secondly, given the extreme and unprecedented depth of this crisis, the movement must be huge, bigger probably than anything we’ve seen before.

This is fairly obvious but it is still worth emphasising, and it has clear implications for the level of priority socialists need to give to this work; it also implies that the movement has to be broad and inclusive, based around the simple demand that emissions must be cut to a safe level.

What this level should be is determined not by political expediency or by the economic constraints of capital but by the best available scientific knowledge.

The movement will have to grow very rapidly indeed if we are going to avoid catastrophic and irreversible feedback effects - the famous tipping points. It needs to be resilient too, if it is going to avoid being knocked off course by a ruling class hell bent on defending profitability.

The question that arises therefore is this: what sort of alliance can deliver on all these criteria?

There are two social forces that are absolutely key to this: organised labour and the youth. The youth have the biggest stake in fighting for the planet’s future, and they also have the energy and natural radicalism to push the movement forward.

But just as the trade unions have been severely weakened by the defeats of the past, so too have the students.

Students today are heavily in debt and endure a much more intense examination treadmill than at any time in the past. This is reflected in a historically low level of radicalism, certainly in the universities.

Where there is a radicalisation it tends to be among younger students, in the schools and colleges. This is certainly what we’re finding in Manchester, where there is a real resonance for the climate campaign among school students but less so in the universities.

But of course, the social force with the weight to really push through the changes that are needed is the working class itself.

Our class has the capacity to reorganise production so it is not only rationally and democratically planned but also environmentally sustainable.

As ecosocialists, our primary task is therefore to turn the emerging climate movement decisively towards organised labour, and also to ensure that environmental issues become central priorities for the unions, at the level of action rather than just platitudes.

This approach implies a decisive break with the past, for both the environmental movement itself and the unions, both of whom have a long standing and deep seated distrust of each other, at least at the level of their respective bureaucracies.

The trade union bureaucracy pointedly relegates environmental issues on the spurious grounds of defending jobs.

And most leading environmentalists look to capitalist governments and corporate management for solutions to the crisis.

In arguing for the climate campaign to build a strategic alliance with organised labour therefore, we are in effect exposing the opportunism of both bourgeois environmentalism and the trade union bureaucracy.

We are making some headway with this strategy. The Manchester Carnival is developing a real resonance among school students, and is also drawing a lot of support from union branches. We are also seeing a very positive response among rank and file trade unionists to the proposal for a labour movement conference on climate, which is being planned for February next year.

The conference will give us an opportunity to build networks of environmental activists throughout the labour movement, activists who will not only organise within the unions to build the mass actions of the climate campaign, but who will also be equipped to push forward the important debates on the sustainable reorganisation of production under workers’ control.

George Monbiot ends his book Heat by arguing that this movement is unique in that we are ultimately building a campaign against ourselves. I think this is the wrong approach. We will never build a mass movement by demanding austerity.

Instead, we should present a positive vision of the future, a sustainable future in which our class controls its own destiny and thereby transcends once and for all humanity’s alienation from nature.