Climate change and social transformation in times of corona

Climate crisis and social transformation in times of corona
Why the capitalist production of wealth is at stake
from Norbert Trenkle

[This article published on 4/29/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.krisis.org/2020/klimakrise-und-gesellschaftliche-transformation-in-zeiten-von-corona/.]

First published on Telepolis

Preliminary note: An extended version of the present text will be published in autumn in the book Shutdown. Climate Crash, Corona Crisis and the Necessary Abolition of Capitalism (Unrast Verlag), which the author is publishing together with Ernst Lohoff.

It is one of the strange side effects of the Corona Crisis that in just a few weeks it has contributed more to improving the world climate than the entire climate policy of recent years. Because car traffic in major cities has fallen by up to 80 percent, air traffic has been extremely reduced and many production plants are at a standstill, the Global Carbon Project expects CO2 emissions to fall by around 5 percent in 2020. And it seems that even the German government, despite its toothless climate policy measures, could still succeed in achieving the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent compared to 1990 (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24.3.2020).

Short-term braking
However, there is no reason to hope that the corona crisis will lead to a lasting reduction in environmentally harmful emissions and limit global warming. For the temporary halt of economic activities in large parts of the world has done nothing to change the basic logic of the capitalist mode of production, which is driven by the end in itself of the endless accumulation of abstract wealth represented in money. The compulsion for growth resulting from this end in itself is by no means suspended by the measures taken to combat the corona pandemic, but only slowed down for a short time. At the same time, the governments and central banks are doing everything they can to mitigate this braking maneuver and to keep the economic momentum going, at least in a precarious way, and to get it back on track as quickly as possible once the containment measures have ended. It is hardly likely that this will actually succeed. For even if the great global economic crisis that has just begun was triggered by the measures taken to combat the pandemic, the force that it is likely to develop has deeper, structural reasons that cannot be remedied by economic stimulus packages and cash injections.

Cynically, one could now argue that a global economic crisis is good for the climate because the decline in economic activity will result in fewer greenhouse gases and other harmful substances being released. All statistics on the crises of the past decades - not least the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009 - confirm this fact. But this ecological relief is only the flip side of a massive impoverishment and impoverishment of large parts of the population. For since in capitalist society all social relations tend to take the form of commodities, and since access to things is therefore predominantly provided by money, an interruption of the flow of commodities and money necessarily leads to a more or less severe collapse of social supply: Companies go bankrupt, workers are laid off, and because the sources of income dry up, millions of people can no longer even buy the most basic necessities. Of course, the question is not asked whether the products and services in question are socially necessary or not, what their ecological balance sheet looks like and under what conditions they are produced; for these criteria play no role in the world of goods production. What counts is whether the things produced can be sold on the market and make a profit.

The material wealth
Therefore, of course, in crises, cars continue to be produced and coal-fired power stations operated, air travel continues and luxury apartments are built, while many people cannot even buy food and hospitals are closed because they are no longer "profitable" or public funding is cut off. In the crises it becomes particularly clear that under capitalist conditions only abstract wealth, i.e., wealth expressed in monetary units, counts; in contrast, material wealth, i.e., the wealth of useful things and supplies, is always only a secondary means to the end of capital accumulation and is therefore sacrificed when this purpose can no longer be fulfilled.

In the Corona crisis, the state has now stepped in in most countries in order to ensure public supply to some extent and to avoid the immediate collapse of companies due to curfews and paralysis of the economy. But as much as the emergency measures make it abundantly clear that the market can by no means regulate everything, as the neoliberal ideology has always propagated, the state's access to the production of social wealth remains limited.

The State
It is true that the state represents the general in capitalist society and is responsible for maintaining social cohesion against the centrifugal tendency inherent in it. Without the state, capitalist society would disintegrate within a very short time, for it is fundamentally contradictorily constituted. General commodity production means that people make their social connection by producing things in private form for anonymous others. In other words, they behave socially by pursuing their private, particular interests, or in other words, they are social in a non-societal way.1 The dynamic of opposing particular interests resulting from this fundamental contradiction would very quickly blow up the social context if there were not a separate instance that prevents precisely this and guarantees the framework for the general activity of the producers of goods. Nevertheless, the state is by no means above the logic of the abstract production of wealth, but is at the same time one of its essential prerequisites and remains dependent on it. One of its most original tasks is to keep the dynamics of commodity production and capital accumulation in motion. If this does not succeed, it loses, first, its legitimacy among the population and, second, its ability to act, because it can only fulfill its own tasks if it has the necessary financial means.

Therefore, while the state can intervene in the market and even temporarily shut it down if this serves a general interest, as in the case of a pandemic, it must also do everything possible to revive the accumulation of capital. And it is to this goal that all other interests and objectives are then usually subordinated.

Getting rid of regulations
It is therefore also foreseeable that after the acute phase of the Corona crisis the already half-baked climate policy measures of recent years will all come under fire. Business representatives are already demanding that obstacles such as environmental protection regulations must now be removed so that the economy can get back on track quickly after the lockdown. For example, the major German car companies are putting pressure on the EU Commission to override the CO2 limits that will apply from 2020. And the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony is even calling for a scrappage premium for cars, of course only to encourage a switch to "environmentally friendly drives", just as if car traffic itself were not one of the biggest environmental problems of all. It will not remain so. Just as the ideologues of the market economy are now offsetting the consequences of the Corona pandemic against the economic damage caused by the lockdown, they will then argue that not only is global warming a threat to humanity, but also a paralyzed economy, because millions of people are losing their livelihoods as a result. In doing so, they basically admit that capitalism puts humanity in a fatal dependency on its destructive accumulation logic and presents it with the alternative of dying either from ecological destruction or from economic hardship. But nevertheless this argument will find great resonance with those who fear for their existence in the face of the crisis and have no hope for another form of society.

So if the "climate issue" is not to be pushed off the political agenda, it must be reformulated in a way that is adequate to the new social crisis situation. This is not as difficult as it may seem at first glance. Measures to save the climate and protect the natural bases of life are only in contradiction to securing human existence and social provision if the capitalist form of wealth production is taken for granted. For since in principle all people in today's society depend on the production of abstract wealth in order to survive, they are in a kind of hostage situation. They must hope that the movement of the endless accumulation of capital as an end in itself will continue, because this is the only way they can sell their labor or their goods, even if they know that this will further advance the ecological catastrophe that is already taking place.2

But if we question this form of wealth production, this contradiction dissolves. For if social production is oriented towards material wealth, i.e. the goal is the production of useful things to satisfy the concrete-sensual needs of all people, then an ecologically sustainable orientation of society is no longer in contrast to a good material security of life, but coincides with it. It would then be extremely unreasonable, for example, to pump climate-damaging gases into the atmosphere, to clear forests en masse or to contaminate the groundwater, if it is generally known that this would destroy the human basis of life. And it would be absurd to advocate the production of things that are harmful to the environment and health, just because it gives so many people the opportunity to sell their labor and earn an income. Under capitalist conditions, however, this is exactly what is "reasonable", because the entire social life is based on the production of abstract wealth.

It is therefore important to put this kind of "reason" and the mode of production and living on which it is based at the center of criticism. Of course, this also changes the political orientation.

Advocates of the free market: in a weak position to begin with
The "climate question" then classifies itself into a whole bundle of essential "questions", all of which can be answered by a radical transformation of the production of wealth, or more precisely, by a consistent orientation of the production of social wealth towards concrete-material criteria and the goal of a good life for all. Of course, such a political goal will provoke fierce conflicts; for it ultimately means a fundamental questioning of the capitalist mode of production and living, which is far more than an "economic system" but is deeply embedded in social relations and subjectivities. Nevertheless, in this respect, too, the Corona crisis has in a certain sense played its part in shaking up some of the self-evident things that have been taken for granted up to now. When rent payments can be temporarily suspended, when public transportation is not subject to ticket controls, when there are calls everywhere for the privatization and economization of the health care system to be reversed, and when governments want to nationalize companies in order to secure public services, this breaks the logic of abstract wealth and places material wealth at the center. Although these were only emergency measures of a temporary nature, which the state fulfills in fulfilling its role as guardian of the common good, they represented a profound break with the neoliberal ideology that had already come under massive pressure in the wake of the financial and economic crisis of 2008.

For this reason, any attempt to return to the political status quo ante after the acute phase of the crisis will provoke fierce social disputes over the question of how to organize and guarantee the general provision of services to society. This dispute has already begun at the media level. The free market advocates find themselves in a weak position at first, because the Corona crisis mercilessly reveals that the privatization and economization of the health care system and other sectors of public provision has disastrous consequences for society. In view of this, a broad-based nationalization or re-nationalization of these sectors seems the obvious solution. Against this background, voices are growing louder in the leftist discourse calling for a renewal of the Keynesian social and regulatory state or even for state socialism, and hopes are being raised in the green spectrum that capitalism will be reformed in a socio-ecological way through state requirements and market-economy incentives.

However, this overlooks the fact that the state, even when viewed in a very fundamental way, always remains referred to the system of abstract wealth production in its actions and in its access to material wealth. Within this system, the state does have room for maneuver with regard to how it performs public tasks, to what extent social inequalities are mitigated, and in what way it influences production and working conditions. And of course, it is politically correct to use this room for maneuver to implement social and ecological improvements, as far as this is possible. But still the state cannot eliminate the fundamental, self-serving dynamics of the production of abstract wealth, but can only ever somehow repair or gloss over its worst consequences.

Scope of action of the states
In addition, the great era of state-regulated and socially cushioned capitalism, which was based on mass labor in the industrial sector and a strong domestic economy, is long gone and cannot be recovered. In the era of financialization and globalization, however, the scope for action by states has become increasingly narrow, because they must do everything possible to keep their own territory attractive as a location for capital and, above all, to secure the influx of fictitious capital.3

For since the Third Industrial Revolution made more and more labor in the production of goods "superfluous", the accumulation of abstract wealth has shifted to the financial markets, where it has developed a breathtaking dynamic based on the anticipation of future value in the form of financial securities (fictitious capital). Therefore, in the recurrent and each time sharper financial crises, the states have no choice but to do "whatever is necessary" (Mario Draghi) to save the financial and banking system from collapse. This will be no different in the Corona crisis. For the course of this crisis differs from the financial crises of recent decades in that it was triggered by the politically ordered shutdown of economic and social activities and therefore has a direct impact on the "real economy". Nevertheless, it has immediately spread to the already over-stimulated financial markets and triggered enormous upheavals there, the consequences of which are not yet foreseeable.

It is therefore easy to predict that the priorities of governments and central banks will very soon be to rescue the banking and financial system. For if the avalanche of uncovered promises for the future is unleashed there, it will also drag large parts of the "real economy" and public services into the abyss. In contrast to 2008/2009, however, this time the monetary policy instruments of the central banks have already been exhausted to a very large extent, and in addition, at the global political level it is not to be expected that the major economic powers will agree on a joint approach. Rather, it is becoming apparent that each of them is pursuing its own interests at the expense of the others and that the already existing trend towards nationalistic and regional compartmentalization is gaining additional momentum.4 The German government is demonstrating this by rejecting the Eurobonds, which is not only infamous and shabby but also narrow-minded, because objectively the Federal Republic is the one that benefits most from European unity and the Euro. But nationalism follows its own dangerous logic, which does not necessarily have to be functional in an economic sense.

Authoritarian crisis and emergency management and social resistance
The return of the state will therefore be under a completely different sign than in the hopeful left-wing and green blueprints. It is certainly to be expected that under public pressure the emergency nationalization of many sectors will be maintained or even expanded. But at the same time, governments will pursue a rigorous austerity policy, citing the costs of crisis management, and will flank this with nationalist appeals to the population's willingness to make sacrifices and with stricter control measures, such as those currently being tested on a grand scale. For it is not only the logic of the market that is compromised in the face of the social tasks at hand, but the entire reference system of production of abstract wealth is coming apart at the seams. For this reason, government action in more and more countries is increasingly being reduced to authoritarian crisis and emergency management. For the less the state can secure its legitimacy as guardian of the common good by securing public services, the more clearly its stately core emerges.

In order to be able to fight against this threatening development, it must succeed in bundling the social and political resistance that it will generate or is already generating. This is not as self-evident as it may seem at first glance. For the manifold struggles against the intensified austerity policy and state control policy, against the destruction of natural resources and car traffic, against the pricelessness of housing and the precarization of labor relations, etc. are very quickly transformed within the system of abstract wealth production into particular interest struggles that can then be played off against each other politically; for example, when the climate movement demands the highest possible CO2 tax, which would place a greater burden on the poorer sections of the population in particular. It must therefore be made clear that these struggles and conflicts, as different as they may appear at first glance, always converge negatively at one point: they are all an effect of the independent and destructive logic of the production of abstract wealth and the underlying, contradictory form of unsocial sociality.

Only when this negative commonality becomes conscious can the different struggles turn into a common force that fundamentally questions the capitalist mode of production and life. Beyond that, however, a new perspective of social emancipation is needed, which, however, in broad outlines ex negativo results from the criticism of the system of abstract wealth.

Self-Organization
Of course, it cannot be a matter of recycling the old idea of nationalizing social life; because apart from the fact that the state has always been the other side of the market, its return today is only conceivable in the form of crisis authoritarianism, nationalism and political regression. What is rather at issue is the comprehensive socialization of production and public supply within the framework of a general and free, social self-organization beyond the production of goods and the logic of state administration and rule. Of course, this will not happen in one fell swoop, but only in the course of a longer process of social transformation. What this means in detail cannot be predicted today, but it is clear that this process will be characterized by conflict-laden political debates about the resources and potential of wealth production and about the framework conditions for developing new forms of social cooperation, communication, and planning. For the social alternative does not grow out of any niches, as is imagined in some alternative concepts. It can only be constituted in the struggle for the field of the socially general. It is necessary to reinvent this field; not as the other, domineering side of a production of wealth, which becomes independent and confronts its actors as "second nature"; but as part of a society in which people consciously control their circumstances.
1 Norbert Trenkle: Non-Societal Sociality, http://www.krisis.org 2019
2 Norbert Trenkle: Licence for climate-chilling, Streifzüge 77, Vienna 2019
3 Ernst Lohoff/ Norbert Trenkle: The Great Devaluation, Münster 2012; Norbert Trenkle: Workout. The crisis of Arveit and the limits of capitalism, http://www.krisis.org 2018
4 Ernst Lohoff: The Last Days of World Capital. Capital Accumulation and Politics in the Age of Fictitious Capital, Crisis 5/2016