Alarm bells are now ringing that time is running out to prevent catastrophic climate change. With its stark conclusions that global warming is human induced, that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and that drastic action is necessary to prevent large parts of the world from becoming uninhabitable, the IPCC’s latest report gives world leaders preparing for November’s COP26 summit a clear warning of the consequences of further failure to reach a deal that cuts C02 emissions enough to limit the rise in global temperature to below 2 degrees above the pre-industrial level. The cost of failure might be the loss of the very resources on which the capitalist system depends, including the lives and wellbeing of millions of workers whose unpaid labour generates profits.
In the run up to COP26 we are likely to see bold statements of intent from capitalist politicians. Leading the pack will be the host, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who on a recent trip to Scotland promised a “smooth and sensible” shift from fossil fuels to renewable power and predicted that every home in the country could be powered by wind alone by 2030. He made this staggering claim, while at the same time joking with journalists that his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had been an environmental visionary for closing Scotland’s coalmines in the nineteen eighties. This callous remark reveals the attitude of many of the world’s political leaders, whose job it is to represent the interests of big business over the health and wellbeing of working people and the poor. The mass closure of Scotland’s mines devastated whole communities for a generation and left a legacy of poverty, poor health and decreased life expectancy. While we may see attempts this November to engineer a ‘green transition’, we can be sure the intention will be that it is achieved over the bones of the working class whose lives in the short term will be seen as so much collateral damage.
A revival of the climate movement
Alongside the overblown promises of capitalist politicians will be a renewal of the global climate movement that swept the planet in 2018/19. In Britain, already the campaign group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has taken to the streets in London and other major cities, blocking roads and occupying public buildings. They have promised a series of protests that could repeat and even surpass the acts of civil disobedience that brought the capital to a standstill in 2019. Huge numbers are expected to descend on Glasgow for COP26 between 1st and 12th November and there may be a renewal of the School Climate Strikes previously spearheaded by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg.
While the renewed upsurge of the Climate Movement is welcome, drawing potentially large numbers of young people towards renewed political activity, there are clear limitations to the amorphous approach adopted by XR, Thunberg and the ‘leaders’ of the Climate Strikes. The most significant of these is a general call to rebellion without a clear political programme, democratic accountability and strategy to challenge the power of big business, especially the energy and fossil fuel companies. For example, alongside its call for mass civil disobedience XR calls for supporters to ‘go beyond politics’ and create Citizens Assemblies where representatives, selected at random, discuss issues and present findings to Government who are either persuaded by argument or put under the pressure of public opinion through clever media campaigns.
Rather than ‘go beyond politics’ this approach leaves politics in the hands of the same capitalist politicians who have so resolutely defended the interests of the carbon polluters. At best, it relegates climate activism to the level of a pressure group; at worst, it separates the potential for mass struggle from the only real force with the power to change society — the organised working class.
An intimation of the potential division inherent in civil disobedience that does not involve the working class, labour and trade union movement was given during the London protests of 2019. In one incident XR protesters were dragged off the roof of a London Underground train and kicked by an angry passenger who shouted, “I have to get to work — I have to feed my kids”. In another incident protesters who had glued themselves to the Dockland Light Railway (DLR) at Canary Wharf received the following response from a woman prevented from boarding her train at Shadwell: “The bankers and the CEOs of the most polluting industries are certainly not travelling on the DLR at 07.00 BST”.
Organizing and mobilising workers is crucial to building the type of climate movement we need. Marxists emphasise the importance of the working class in bringing about social change because of its critical role in maintaining the capitalist system and ability to lead society into a socialist future. Without workers to run the factories and farms, keep the lights on and the trains moving it is impossible for the bosses to make profits. In relation to the Climate Change movement, therefore, the support of workers in transport, energy, manufacturing and agriculture as well as those involved in servicing and supporting those industries is crucial.
What role can the Trade Unions play?
Climate activists looking for a lead from the tops of the trade union movement will be disappointed. No more so than from Gary Smith, recently elected leader of GMB, Britain’s third largest union, representing over 600,000 workers that includes many in the energy sector. Smith has gone on record as saying Glasgow is ‘unfit’ to host COP26 because of cuts in local services and that his members are less interested in the “big future” than they are in making ends meet.
While Smith is correct to expose the hypocrisy of staging a summit of world leaders in a city where poverty and decay is rife, he is wrong to lower the sights of his members to that of simply ‘making a living’. Workers have a proud history of imagining the ‘big future’ when a serious struggle has taken place. When workers at the Visteon car components occupied their plants in England and Northern Ireland in 2009, for example, they issued a statement that said, ‘Our skills — we can make anything in plastic — should be used to make increasingly needed parts for green products: bike and trailer parts, solar panels, turbines, recycling bins etc’. This occupation had echoes of the famous ‘Lucas Plan’ put forward by workers at Lucas Aerospace in 1976 who, in response to announced job cuts, proposed to transfer their skills from building military hardware into socially useful production: 150 products ranging from hybrid vehicles to medical equipment were put forward as suggested alternatives to weapons of destruction.
As a new wave of climate struggle develops over the coming months, workers’ strikes can become an essential part of building a powerful, mass movement to fight climate change. Climate activists, alongside rank and file union activists will have to build pressure from below to demand leaders join such a movement.
There will be many more struggles like these examples, where the environmental cause can be taken up by workers in key industries. The recently settled ‘hire and fire’ dispute involving British Gas engineers is an obvious example where jobs and long-term livelihoods depend on how companies like this are able to adjust to expected restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. Marxists have a vital role to play in raising the demand for workers control as part of a socialist energy plan for a carbon neutral future.
We need a just transition for working class people
It is not ruled out that capitalist politicians may resort to state intervention, including nationalisations, to mitigate the worst effects of catastrophic climate change. We can be certain, however, that their priority will be using public funds to underwrite the profits of big business in the same way they have spent billions in hand-outs to private companies to source PPE, fake testing and ineffective Track & Trace systems during the Covid 19 pandemic. That’s why Marxists cannot restrict our demands to ‘system change’ without raising the need for democratic workers’ control of society. It is only in this way that the additional wealth created by workers which today make up capitalist profits can be directed into socially useful production that meets the needs of humanity without damaging the long-term future of the planet on which life depends.
In 2009, the Campaign Against Climate Change trade union group published a report in conjunction with four trade unions that made the case for ‘one million (UK) climate jobs’ as part of a green transition. Twelve years on, these modest demands are only a fraction of what is necessary to pull humanity back from the precipice. Even so, the IPCC estimates that even now each nation would still only need to spend 1% of its GDP to prevent runaway climate change. Consciousness amongst the broad mass is shifting and could rapidly develop, especially among young people towards socialist conclusions. This is an opportunity for Marxists to appeal to workers in struggle using an approach that links the crisis affecting all sectors with the systemic problems wrought by capitalism. Through this the confidence and consciousness of the working class can be raised to undertake its historic task of the socialist transformation of society.