Eternal Night: Ecosocialism and the Specific Ecological Threat of Trumpism

Introduction

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was a shock (although perhaps for different reasons) to a great many of us. His presidency poses unique challenges for many groups, particularly those at the blunt end of the “random Brown Shirt elements [that] Trump's victory has emboldened.” ¹ Nevertheless the aim of this article is to resist the temptation to claim that Trump is uniquely bad in every respect. Indeed, I argue that in terms of the environment—safety, justice, equality—a Trump administration does not pose a specific threat, but is merely a more bellicose version of a generalized neoliberal regime, composed of both Democrats and Republicans, which take as their starting point the acceptability of capitalism and its ability to solve our political–environmental issues. There are, of course, differences between Democrats and Republicans with respect to environmental concerns, but the differences are not as stark as they may seem at first. On the one hand, the most radical Democratic plan would be something like an eco-capitalism that allows burgeoning green businesses to replace dirtier industries; industries to which, on the other hand, Republicans (and still many Democrats) remained allied. I shall, therefore, gesture toward ecosocialism as the best long-term alternative to green/eco-capitalism.

Discussion

In his 2008 article, “The Value of Environmental Justice” philosopher Bill E. Lawson raises an interesting and challenging question: why should the victims (in Lawson's case, African Americans) feel responsibility to help or to join environmentalist causes since, if we suppose paradigmatically Liberal notions of the individual, “persons responsible for the wrongdoing have the greater burden of responsibility in correcting it.” ² According to Lawson, because of a history of racial injustice, African Americans have borne much of the brunt of poor economic–environmental policies. Hence, when environmentalists push for collective responsibility for the environment, “there are often feelings of mistrust” between the two camps. ³

Responsibility cannot fall solely in the laps of communities who have been victimized by bad environmental decisions, Lawson argues. Rather, persons concerned with environmental justice should begin to ask, and formulate arguments around the problem of, how to make poor persons of color feel responsibility to back and participate in environmentalist programs and policies.

Lawson urges environmentalists to center their focus around the fact that some communities have suffered particularly badly and any attempt to claim community responsibility needs to address that asymmetry. This, I think, is a good starting point, especially in terms of political strategy. However, we must also take into account the fact that most environmental damage is caused by large corporations and their global profit-seeking endeavors, not by groups of individuals based on ascriptive identity categories and their consumption habits. For example, as Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes have recently argued in terms of food and water consumption, “the reality is that individual choices…will probably have less impact than the decision to form part of that global movement which can and will…change the world in a way that no individual action can do.” ⁴

Similarly, as Adolph Reed Jr. has written: “My scrupulous attention to closing the refrigerator door or turning off lights whenever I leave a room may permit me to feel righteous in my commitment to curtail environmental degradation. They have absolutely no substantive impact on the phenomenon, however.” ⁵ To meaningfully address the environmental degradation we have seen, are seeing, and will see, it will take much more than a feeling of individual (or even group) responsibility. It will take concerted political efforts to regulate and redirect environmental capitalism and to question and reevaluate the neoliberal paradigm of individual responsibility.

In December 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump nominating Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Ken Kimmell, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, issued a cutting statement. ⁶ It read in part: “Pruitt's statements and actions are in direct conflict with the job to which he has been nominated… [the EPA] defends environmental justice and fights the risk of catastrophic climate change. Under Pruitt's leadership, all of these policies will suffer and so will the Americans who rely on them.” ⁷ Indeed, if Trump's first executive orders, nominations, and transition advisors are a sign of things to come in the next four years (e.g., Thomas Pyle, ⁸ Myron Ebell, ⁹ and Ryan Zinke, ¹⁰ and others—all opponents of environmental justice and climate science) then their opponents are in for a difficult uphill battle.

The constellation of environmental degradations was hardly in reverse under President Obama, but the situation is far more precarious now. Not only is the Trump Administration fully in favor of reversing any progress made under Obama, they seemingly want to push efforts completely in the opposite direction. Among their plans are to lift the coal lease moratorium, strip away regulations for clean energy plans, push forward oil pipelines and infrastructure (including the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline), reduce wind energy from turbines (due to their “environmental impacts”), lower federal fuel economy standards, and many other potentially disastrous policy changes. ¹¹

But not all of these policies can be pushed through by Trump alone. He needed, and he received, Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a huge majority of Governorships and state legislatures—victories all long in the making. ¹² Despite the problems proponents of environmental justice will always face with a majority cadre of neoliberal Democrats, Republicans have long been, in Gonzalez and Yanes' words, the epitome of “the privatization of the state” in United States politics. ¹³ Hence, because of the vertical and horizontal Federalism we enjoy in the United States—at one point intended to slow overreaching governmental policies—Trump needs corroborators in the Republican party at all governmental levels, as well as friendly multinational corporations and foreign governments. In other words, Trump's plans are not unique to him (despite some Republican detractors during the general election); they are simply expressed in a more bellicose way than typical Republicans allow. As the economist Samir Amin has pointed out, “[t]he consequences of Trump's hostility toward the COP 21 environmental agreement are less serious than its European protagonists suggest, since it is unfortunately clear—or should be clear—that in any event the treaty will remain a dead letter as the rich countries do not intend to keep their financial promises in this area,” gesturing toward environmental hostility that is much more widespread than Trump alone. ¹⁴ Indeed, it remains entirely possible that there are Republicans in power, from the local to national level and often found in gerrymandered clusters, who are even greater threats to environmental justice than Trump, to say nothing of developing economies that also have interests that do not necessarily align with environmental justice.

But certainly these evils are well known. I want to also discuss the other—deeper and yet subtler—problem we face with a Democratic party that is committed to an eco-capitalism, a commitment that forecloses the possibility of a real alternative to the Republican onslaught. ¹⁵ Among the tenets of eco-capitalism is a belief that profit-driven market forces are powerful enough to solve all (or most) environmental degradation. At first glance, this type of solution could form one side of a Marxian dialectic. After all, Marx sang the praises of capitalism and its productive and creative capabilities in the Communist Manifesto. However, as Andrew Szasz has argued, we are far from reaching many of the conditions that would even allow for an eco-capitalism/green consumption model. Perhaps our best political strategy, then, is to organize around an ecosocialism instead of relying on market-based solutions. I should also note that one of the starkest differences between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns was their position on fracking and climate change. While details of their disagreements are beyond the present bounds, through the course of events, Sanders' position seems to have moved Clinton's farther left. ¹⁶

According to Szasz, some basic conditions that would have to obtain for a green consumerist model are: an ecologically educated consumer base knowledgeable in green decision-making, a large-scale understanding that climate change is happening and that consumers themselves can do something about it, comparable quality and price of ecologically friendly goods themselves, amenable government subsidies that spur on innovation, among many others. However, he writes, “most of these conditions don't exist today…Given that time grows short, targeting the individual consumer, trying to change her or his consumption choices, probably should not be a priority” since there exist more structural changes (like federal policy, subsidies, and an urban/suburban dynamic, which would be more efficacious) that should be prioritized. ¹⁷

The political theorist William E. Connolly also makes an important point in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style which stands, we may say, at a middle-point between green consumption and ecosocialism. His primary argument is that we can construct an interim position that can lead to reforms of current policies and institutions such that our political and structural conditions may become more favorable for an ecologically just society. As he writes, “the importance of projecting an interim future is in part tied to our inability in a world of becoming to imagine constructively beyond an interim horizon, in part to the urgent need to relieve the suffering of several constituencies soon, and in part to the short time left to come to terms with the devastating potential of global warming.” ¹⁸ I agree with Connolly given the time constraints that are imposed upon us to change our disastrous ecological course, but I must also be particularly cautious that solutions found within capitalism can only remain provisionary reforms. What we should not forget is that no matter how green our consumption and no matter how environmentally friendly the drive for profit, capitalism must remain an unstable system that always chooses profit over the environment when the two are in competition. When the calculus tips in the favor of profit (for example, when a cost–benefit analysis declares the ecological outlook “positive”), capitalism could easily return to an ecologically damaging mode of operation. Well orchestrated global governance could establish certain regulations to offset environmentally unjust endeavors. Examining such a possibility goes beyond the bounds of this article, but we perhaps should be somewhat skeptical that such a massive-scale project could work as intended, considering the interplay of interests and asymmetrical power relations among actors.

Connolly offers a useful set of reforms intended to resist an unbounded capitalism within United States politics. They include: large-scale state spending on public transportation, public education, single-payer healthcare, and public goods like water, wind, and solar power, alongside the promotion of healthy foods and upper income caps. These reforms, Connolly argues, “provide a start” toward eco-egalitarianism within capitalism aimed at counteracting our ever more dire circumstances. ¹⁹ Indeed, much of these reforms are pursued within the Green Party platform, which, among its main pillars are economic equality, ecological conservation, universal healthcare, the right to a job, labor law reforms, and others. Certainly the Green Party platform is closest, although certainly not equal to, the ecosocialist position described later.

Our next step, however, is to move toward a postneoliberal economic order, a step removed from eco-capitalism/green consumption; one in which the fundamental premises of capitalism itself are reexamined—where environmental stability is in neither a competitive relation nor precarious allies with the global profit motive. ²⁰ It is of equal importance that even as we suggest and accept certain reforms to guide us to a more suitable interim (which must, I believe, include broad class-based solidarity), the idea of an ecosocialist economy must remain on the table and become known to and accepted as a legitimate alternative by a broader audience.

In a recent book, Ian Angus calls ecosocialism (as the alternative to eco-capitalism and green consumption) “the movement we need.” ²¹ But why the need for an ecosocialism, a word which (until very recently from the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign) has been emblazoned with fear and trepidation on many (perhaps most) Americans' lips? Certainly ecosocialism, for our purposes, should be situated in the postindustrial American context, for this context seems to obtain conditions for socialism as broadly conceived in the Marxian tradition. We should not look for a one-size-fits-all solution. But this is not to say that many other industrialized countries around the world have similar contexts to the United States, which would be helpfully guided by ecosocialism (i.e., as opposed to eco-capitalism). However, I also agree with the sociologist Vivek Chibber that capitalism “submits the entire world to one set of structural and economic forces—the same forces. And it brings the entire world into a common struggle against those forces.” ²² So while the solutions may not everywhere be one and the same (for different particular conditions obtain), I agree that there is a common structured enemy as well as the potential for global solidarity.

Multinational corporations readily show their universalizing tendencies, their global profit drive—although it may not necessarily be intentional. ²³ It is seen in the building of unnecessary dams, of mineral extraction, in the dislocation of poor communities, in the dumping of pesticides and plastics into rivers, lake desertification, commercial gene manipulation, deforestation, commodification of water, crop monoculture, and many more invidious activities, all spurred on by multinationals (through an economic system once called corporate globalization) that are occurring all over the globe with no interest for ecological accountability. ²⁴ Or, as Seán Edwards succinctly puts it in a review of Angus' book, “Capitalist states and the capitalist system are neither willing nor able to face up to finding a solution to the crisis of the earth system.” ²⁵

Chibber often reminds his readers about what Marx calls “[t]he silent compulsion of economic relations” which are the very structures of capitalism to which workers must submit and which secure the capitalist's dominant position over the workers. ²⁶ Marx says, “[d]irect extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases…it is possible to rely on [the worker's] dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.” ²⁷ If Marx and Chibber are right, then the silent compulsion of capital moves no matter who the president is—whether a bellicose entertainer or Chicago organizer. So long as the state does not contradict its silent compulsion, capital will continue to move according to its own logic, always pursuing the environmentally unjust.

This is one of the principle reasons that leads me to the ecosocialist conclusion. Already there is a trend in the theoretical literature tending toward a similar conclusion, although positions remain diverse. Those of us who are concerned with environmental justice, however, must acknowledge theoretical diversity and work to build solidarity along common interests and goals. Environmental justice has been on the losing end for too long. As Oliva Bina has written, “we need nothing less than a different concept of socioeconomic progress.” ²⁸ Capitalism is driven to privatize, exploit, dislocate, drain, pollute, and profit. But if I am correct to argue that the natural resources of the world should be sustained and used for the common good of all, then, even as we pursue many interim goals, projects, and solutions to help ourselves reach a more favorable position, we must be against the essential, silent features of capitalism, no matter how green.

Conclusion

Certainly any candidate with even the slightest literacy with regard to environmental ethics and global warming science would be better for those who support policies that reflect some semblance of environmental justice than Trump; for, if nothing else, they are closer to the provisional reforms that Connolly showed would provide something of a beginning of reversal. Furthermore, if we are given two options: one candidate who denies climate change and is in the hands of dirty industries, and the other who is at least somewhat cognizant of the dire environmental concerns we face today and have needed to face for some time—as well as the consequences we will face long into the future—the choice is clear. But we should not let electoral lesser evilism persuade us into believing that eco-capitalism/green consumption will solve our environmental concerns for good. The assemblage of capitalism, states, and divergent interests and goals keeps environmental justice always in a precarious position with respect to environmental justice.

The changes that need to be brought about cannot be accomplished by submitting to the demands of global capitalism, nor by expecting, hoping, or praying that those who have done the greatest wrongs will change their minds on their own. I have previously argued that the victims of vulgar technocratic wrongdoing (like the citizens in Flint, Michigan) should not wait around for the goodwill of the exploiting class to reprimand themselves. ²⁹ What is more desperately needed is a political realignment to begin questioning the neoliberal paradigm itself and offering alternatives to achieve long-term environmental justice. The neoliberal paradigm has been accepted by Republicans and virtually all Democrats. Currently, Republicans control the large majority of political offices around the United States. But we must also ensure that if Democrats (or Greens) begin to gain political power again, their platform disputes the neoliberal paradigm and pursues environmental justice.

I have argued that ecosocialism is a more promising long-term solution than green capitalism, a commitment to deprivatizing resources that should be social goods, and distribution based on need and not profit. Nevertheless, maintaining both the need for obtaining interim goals as well as remaining critical of green capitalism is a delicate balance. Both sides are needed. Nevertheless, we must pursue both; the time for justice is short.