Green Populism

Discussion

Aaron Bastani:

"Fully Automated Luxury Communism is green populism.

This is the vision that must be offered in response to climate change. One that accepts changed relationships to nature, especially other creatures, but which demure from green-primitivism or going ‘back to the land’. For those who do so, it will be a matter of choice rather than necessity.

In this world we need not travel less, nor no longer enjoy crops and foodstuffs from other parts of the planet. Quite the opposite – seeing the great feats of humanity and the beauty of the Earth will be the birthright of all. Life will be easier with ever more time given over to leisure rather than work. What would be the meaning of life? Well, that would be for you to decide.

This is a populist vision that understands the potentials of the present that is soon to come, seeking to shift them to a higher purpose. Fully automated luxury communism is not inevitable, and alternative scenarios are possible: rentism and artificial scarcity are just as plausible as abundance; war and mass destruction as likely as permanently cheaper clean energy. Fundamentally, though, any effective green movement must grasp these technologies or lose. Evolution has no reverse.

What’s more, this populism must be global, reconciling the needs and interests of the poorest countries with the wealthiest. The transition to renewable energy in the Global South – which will enjoy the most abundant and cheapest energy anywhere on Earth – will be made possible by technology transfer and reparations for historic injustice through the form of a global carbon tax. Decarbonising the economy won’t just save the planet, rich and poor, it will give electricity to the hundreds of millions in sub-saharan Africa and South Asia currently without it. It will underpin a level of technological catch-up unthinkable to those who associate large, centralised infrastructures with energy generation and distribution.

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But this populism will need to be pitted against contemporary globalisation, whose model privileges the free movement of goods and capital over people, and whose emphasis on borderless trade – often the default even among leftists – is the essence of the commodity fetish. This model has limited the possibility of states to decarbonise at speed, often through procurement rules centred around fair competition, something well documented by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything.

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The final aspect of green populism is the recognition that states matter, and electoralism is important. For much of the last several decades, the green movement has favoured small-scale, local projects, with genres of activism which favour self-transformation, experimental togetherness and immediacy. All of this is worthwhile, and should not be dispensed with, but radical greens must understand that only states, the greatest instruments of collective action yet created by humans, can pull off what is needed.

So what does ‘pulling it off’ look like? It means the Global North completely decarbonising by 2030 and the Global South by 2040. This means countries across Europe and North America will need to reduce CO2 emissions every year by 8% in the 2020s, with the same holding true for poorer countries over the following decade.

This will require huge levels of consent, alongside the mobilisation of states in something akin to a war effort. Fortunately, people need jobs – until robots perfect sensory-motor coupling – and there are many public goods like universal health, education and housing, which should be folded within a broader project for ecological transformation and social renewal.

Populism doesn’t mean bowing to the lowest common denominator. It means seeing what people want and relaying it through a technological paradigm whose social relations are yet to be decided. It means saying ‘here is a path to limitless abundance’, rather than calling for civilisation to be placed in a straight jacket.

By understanding history as evolutionary flow, we can continue to build that project in the now – in ideas, in production and consumption models, in relations, and in technologies. Importantly, however, this must be combined with a vision of progress and inevitable destiny, with the incumbent organisations of democratic representation – states, unions and parties – the handmaidens to a radically different world." (http://novaramedia.com/2017/11/19/fully-automated-green-communism/)