{"id":3636,"date":"2019-05-14T20:37:05","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T18:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=3636"},"modified":"2020-03-20T01:10:40","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T23:10:40","slug":"real-populism-is-the-answer-to-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2019-05-14\/real-populism-is-the-answer-to-climate-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Real populism is the answer to climate crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is worth considering what \u201cpopulism\u201d represents outside the kneejerk scaremongering<\/a> of the liberal media. Conditions are created for populism when there is widespread loss of faith in a society’s traditional organs of authority: the political class, the \u201cmainstream\u201d media and expert institutions.<\/p>\n

Those most exercised about populism, unsurprisingly, are the professional class in charge of those very same institutions. Their job has always been to guard the economic interests of the ruling elite.<\/p>\n

The rise of populism in both its rightwing and leftwing manifestations, and the more general political polarisation in our societies, are the symptoms of a breakdown in trust, a collapse of consensus, a rupture of the social contract. And the reasons for these developments are staring us in the face.<\/p>\n

Brexit, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Ilhan Omar aren\u2019t the causes of our problems. They are the products of increasingly confused, frustrated and angry electorates desperate to smash the stranglehold on our societies of failed \u201cexperts\u201d \u2013 the political, media and academic class \u2013 that have so clearly betrayed us on behalf of the real power-holders: the corporations that run our societies.<\/p>\n

Estranged from nature<\/h3>\n

One doesn\u2019t need to be a Marxist to see that more than 150 years ago Karl Marx offered profound insights into the society of his time \u2013 and of our time too. He correctly observed that capitalism contained within it the seeds of its own destruction, and that industrialised workers suffered from \u201calienation\u201d \u2013 they had lost any meaningful sense of their own humanity as they became little more than cogs in the vast, compassionless machinery of production processes. As a result, they were increasingly estranged from the natural world.<\/p>\n

What was obvious to Marx then should be far easier for us to comprehend now.<\/p>\n

Even so, his analysis was inevitably limited to what it was possible to imagine about the industrialised economies of that period. He could not have properly understood then that capitalism’s logic was as much a threat to the planet’s climate as it was to the working class, or that social media would one day offer the potential for us to liberate ourselves from official propaganda, even if at the same time it overwhelmed us with so much information, good and bad alike, that many of us have been left seeking solace in simplistic counter-narratives, turning real life into our very own version of Game of Thrones.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, these twin developments are very much the logical outgrowths of our highly corporatised societies. Climate change highlights capitalism\u2019s inherent self-destructiveness, making it unmistakeable to growing sections of western publics. And at the same time the information revolution embodied by social media offers the hope of personal and collective transformation, a path to change and to ending the alienation that has brought us to the brink.<\/p>\n

Easy bogeymen<\/h3>\n

Today, the battle is between those who wish to cling to the sinking wreckage of the existing order \u2013 a turbo-charged neoliberal capitalism \u2013 and those who urgently want to encourage us down the path of radical change.<\/p>\n

In the US context, the struggle is between the new insurgency politicians, on the one hand, and the Russiagaters who dominate the political and media landscape, on the other. Between those trying to reshape the political conversation so that it addresses for the first time in living memory issues that actually matter \u2013 the US imperial role in foreign wars; America’s long-standing anti-black racism, which Trump is formalising into an explicit white supremacism; the power of the gun and banking lobbies; the rule of the corporations \u2013 and those reassured by a lazy patriotism that pins America\u2019s woes on easy bogeymen like Trump and Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

In the UK context, the battle is between devout Remainers \u2013 those who beatify the European Union, thinking it can somehow save us from ourselves \u2013 and the activists of Extinction Rebellion, who understand that we need radical new thinking and ideas, not a return to the 1970s. The divide is between those infuriated by peaceful demonstrations that briefly disrupt major highways and those warning that the near-permanent congestion on roads is one sign of our civilisation’s imminent demise.<\/p>\n

Forget the politicians and the media: the issue is not whether the Brexit or Remain camp is right. Rather, the debate itself is an evasion, an endless displacement activity from the reality that we have a few years left to save ourselves; that we are just one of those 1 million species on the verge of extinction; and that all these species, us included, will either sink or swim together. No exceptions.<\/p>\n

The Brexit-Remain debate is a symptom of our continuing arrogance, our refusal to confront the real challenge of what it means to be in harmony not only with other human beings but with life itself.<\/p>\n

Waking from a slumber<\/h3>\n

Climate breakdown should be the wake-up call for us all, and yet there are still those who wish to distract themselves from the natural world from which we have been so deeply alienated. They still want to debate whether climate change is real; whether it is imminent and serious; whether human beings are responsible; whether we can fix it with technology; whether we can escape it by living in space<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Until we understand that these debates are an illness, a pathology that capitalism cultivated in us, such arguments will continue even as the planet\u2019s colours, viewed from space, turn from green and blue to a scorched yellow and a burnt black.<\/p>\n

But even as we try to wake up from our long slumber, we risk stepping into another trap. We have become so distrustful of experts and of our institutions that the starker the reality, as the facts of climate change reveal themselves physically, the more some people start to believe the dawning reality is a lie too.<\/p>\n

This is another kind of evasion, but one that hides from itself \u2013 posing as dissent, as radicalism. These “dissidents” argue that the climate science is bogus, that the scientists are distorting the data to justify their salaries and funding, and that corporations are really behind what is simple alarmism.<\/p>\n

This approach forgets that context is everything. Climate change is not new, even if many of us are waking up to it only now, very belatedly. It has been measurable<\/a> for more than a century, even if the necessary intellectual framework for making sense of the science was absent.<\/p>\n

\n

Wait for it. Global temperature from 1861 to 2018. Notice a pattern?<\/p>\n

There is no time to wait, there is no planet B. We must #ActOnClimate<\/a>#GreenNewDeal<\/a> #climate<\/a> #energy<\/a> #panelsNotPipelines<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/58FH7xY1J5<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) May 10, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n