The Ecological Class

Climate activists stare listlessly into space and wonder where the momentum went. Covid, of course, and the Democratic Party took their toll, but so does defeat, howling into the void, pissing in the wind. As more and more fossil fuels get pumped and burned. As more and more data centers consume more and more energy. As the commanding heights of industry become the state, eliminating the unnecessary middlemen. The politicians who aren't politicians, the elite who aren't the elite. The Fourth International remains determined and just produced a manifesto that promotes de-growth ecosocialism. So that's cool. I attended the unveiling and found the concerted effort inspiring and indeed, the text does reflect some real shifts in theorizing. The analysis of our historical juncture is spot on but being mostly old school Trotskyists, there is some hold-over dogma which I believe needs to be re-examined. One critical point is around class: class and subject formation, class struggle, class consciousness etc...There is lots of ambiguous text about the exploited and oppressed and all the intersectionality of all the various "layers of the working class, the youth, the women, the indigenous...", in other words, kind of everybody? Anybody? Peasants, queer folk, ethnicities, all part of One Big "eco-unionism." Well not anybody. They explicitly dismiss what Bruno Latour and Nicolaj Schultz have termed "the ecological class", calling it "imaginary". Readers of this blog might know that I'm a pretty big fan of Latour (RIP), and while their essay, or "memo" titled On the Emergence of an Ecological Class gets a little dense and a little flowery at times, I for one appreciate the effort to re-examine the orthodox Marxian class analysis, something needed and way overdue. Capital has moved along with our accelerating history and so should socialist thought. Remember the line about "all fixed, fast-frozen relations" being swept away? These include relations of production. Work and workers have also changed and our theories of change need to reflect that. Latour asks us to re-think production itself, hoping to replace it with engendering. A whole blog post in itself. But he realized we would need many earths to accomodate all the production and development that the Moderns have planned. And that "transition" is also an illusion. The shift is going to be abrupt and scary and painful. While the manifesto's authors acknowledge that "productivism is destructivism", they still center production as the site of struggle and producers as the agents of change. If anything is "imaginary" it is the old proletariat, the organized, collective working class sharing a sense of class belonging. Ready to become the revolutionary subject, the agent of radical change. Sure, they could form a section of the ecological class, same as "youth" or "indigenous". But we don't want to wait for them to lead anything. That's waiting for Godot.