The problem with contemporary politics isn’t that its unpleasantness puts people off the profession, it’s that politics is a profession to begin with. 1/9 ft.com/content/81614c…
Rather than empowering workers and communities to govern themselves in their collective interest, Western so-called democracies disempower us, robbing us of our capacity for self-rule and the shared pursuit of individual and collective flourishing. 2/9

I'm starting to think the way fossil capital is used in Left debate can be obfuscatory. It's used in at least two distinct senses. First, to mean a global capitalist system dependent on fossil fuel energy. Second, as a specific sector of global capital. 1/x If it’s used in the latter sense then we also need to talk about renewable capital, agricultural capital, health capital, real estate capital, and so on. 2/

Here's a quick thread about how global heating is experienced by the world's working classes as an assault on their capacity to reproduce themselves within capital's circuits of accumulation and what this could mean for the shape of class struggles to come. 1/12 🧵 A study published this week finds that global heating could cause average world incomes to decline by as much as 19% by 2050. Incomes in the US and Europe could drop by around 11%, while those in South Asia and Africa could fall by 22%. 2/12nature.com/articles/s4158…

The De Guyter Handbook of Degrowth is out now with incredible contributions from 41 scholars, authors, and activists. Thank you to everyone involved! Here's a thread about what we hope the handbook delivers and what I've learned from editing it. 🧵1/12degruyter.com/document/doi/1… Our goals with the collection were to do justice to the broad range of theories and practices that sit beneath the umbrella term of degrowth and to trace degrowth's interdisciplinary — or as we call it following Wallerstein, unidisciplinary — influence. 2/12

This is a good popular introduction to the limits of green growth, but it also shows the relative weakness of critiques of capitalism that limit themselves to the problem of growth. 1/9 thenation.com/article/econom… The article's primary claim is that growth is incompatible with a livable planet. Fine. But missing from this is a more fine-grained understanding of *why* capital creates a treadmill of boundless GDP growth and material and energetic throughput.2/9

A revolutionary transformation at a world scale would be driven by a coalition of the oppressed including social movements, trade unions, small commodity producers, Indigenous peoples, semi-proletarians, 'surplus populations', peasants, national liberation movements, and more.1/9

https://twitter.com/Matthuber78/status/1728886675823358125

Each of these groups is internally differentiated. Some have competing interests with others. This is why eco-socialist organizing is first and foremost about *composing* a set of shared interests through struggle. 2/9

Vincent Bevins' new book, If We Burn, is a must read. A fine-grained and thoughtful reflection on the 2010's global sequence of struggle. Bevins' critique of that period's interpretation of spontaneity and its vulnerability to organized power is one of the clearest I've read. 1/4 Among other things, the book is an argument for building a new repertoire of struggle based on representation, mediation, and formal organization. @Vinncent rightly argues that we need organizations capable of stepping into power vacuums *before* those vacuums are created. 2/4

I may disagree with them, but I can understand where many of Left eco-modernism’s ideas come from. The one I can't grasp is a rejection of — or generation of suspicion around — non-negotiable ecological boundaries, thresholds, and limits. 1/5 I get that notions like carrying capacity should be resisted insofar as they naturalise capitalist social relations and channel attention towards overall population reductions. I get that the earth’s carrying capacity is heavily dependent on the modes of life we lead. 2/5

Hardly anyone on the populist and far right denies anthropogenic climate change anymore but in the past few weeks I’ve noticed an uptick in a new rhetorical pincer move that is equally troubling. 1/8 Step one: claim that any concern about the severity or urgency of the crisis is doomerism or a millenarian distraction from making sensible policy. This serves to downplay the gravity of the crisis and it's invariably aimed at social movements or 'alarmist' climate scientists.2/8

This is getting a lot of negative attention, but I think the banana is a well-chosen example on many fronts. Here's a thread sketching why limited access to bananas in temperate regions in the future might be unavoidable and might not be so bad. 🧵

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/1681031815291609088

1) Today's mass consumption of bananas in temperate regions is a product of the subjugation and violent integration of tropical producers and ecosystems into capital’s circuits of accumulation.

It's quite common to see even progressive farmers arguing consumers should pay more for their food to make the economics of farming work. Two issues with this. One obvious, one maybe less so. 1/6 The obvious one: many are already struggling to buy food. Food bank usage increased by 38% in the UK this year with an unprecedented rise among employed people. Malnutrition is also on the rise. Wages, in other words, aren't enough to sustain families. They can't pay more. 2/6

This is silly but it lets me clarify my position. 1) I’ve been vegan for over 15 years, primarily because I’m opposed to industrialized agriculture’s meat processing (its labour conditions and treatment of animals) and because it’s an easy way to minimize my ecological impact.

https://twitter.com/nihil_evadere/status/1662623895177015296

2) I believe global meat consumption should be dramatically reduced and replaced, primarily, by agroecologically produced plant proteins. Agroecological farming ought to exist with and alongside a matrix of less intensively managed land to protect important habitats.

There’s a great irony to this tirade against sheep farmers that I think Goldsmith has missed: sheep farming is integral to Britain’s rural economy, culture, and land management because landowners like him have made it so. A long 🧵 1/14 The early expansion of Britain’s wool trade went had in hand with the consolidation of agrarian capitalist relations in Britain in the 15th and 16th centuries, which in turn relied on the enclosure of common land and the dispossession of agrarian producers. 2/14

This is a useful intervention into debates about climate grief, despair, and hope. I’d expect nothing less from the always brilliant Green New Deal Media. Even so, I take issue with its conclusion and especially its interpretation of Raymond Williams' thoughts about hope. 1/4

https://twitter.com/gndmediauk/status/1639232580569448448

For me, the true meaning of Williams' often quoted line about how “to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing” isn’t that we should “let hope try” or make a “leap of faith” as the article says. 2/4

@Matthuber78 The idea of capitalism being "good" is antithetical to my understanding of HM as the historical study of capitalism's contradictory development through time and space and as a mode of production that creates but also continually undermines the conditions for socialism. @Matthuber78 I think this is much more in keeping with Marxist thought and avoids flattening capitalism's history to a balance sheet of good Vs bad in which millions of people have been "scandalously" thrown onto the slaughter bench of history.

I'm late to this but rationing is a terrible framing for a progressive environmental politics. It plays right into the hands of fossil capital, green capital, and eco-modernists who want to portray progressives or eco-socialists as scarcity mongers. 1/5 newrepublic.com/article/170914… See these, for instance, from Nordhaus and Phillips, who aren't entirely wrong for once: 2/5

A few words on why this mistake matters because it’s about much more than misreading our sources. O’Connor’s second contradiction argues that capital creates crises in its conditions of reproduction that may in turn cause an underproduction of *capital*. 1/9

https://twitter.com/KaiHeron/status/1630180810908106754

These conditions of reproduction aren’t ‘nature’ as an abstraction, but workers subjected to poor working conditions, displaced Indigenous communities, landscapes stripped of nutrients, essential pollinating species, fixed capital subject to flooding, rising temperatures etc. 2/9

This says more about Foster’s blind spots than the objects of his ire. To take an example: Deleuze and Guattari are worlds apart from Latour. The former integrate Marx and Amin into a theory of capital. The latter is rigorously anti-Marxist in politics and method. 1/5

https://twitter.com/DanielTutt/status/1621188446894100483

Guattari’s work Three Ecologies (which Foster ignores) is also an important attempt to think the complex interrelation of non-human nature, society, and the subject. The last of these has always jumped out to me as a major point of omission in Foster’s work. 2/5

Bill Gates gave a speech yesterday in which he said that the world is likely to experience 2.5C global heating and that “it will be much better to be born in 20, 40, 60 years from now than any time in the past.” Here are a few reasons why these statements can't both be true. 1/13 By 2050, 1.2 billion people could be forced from their homes by searing heat, crop failures, water shortages, rising sea levels, and associated conflicts. zurich.com/en/media/magaz… 2/13

David Camfield has responded to the exchange between @Matthuber78 and I about contemporary eco-socialist orientations. It clarifies some of the stakes of the debate, but he also gets some things wrong about my position and occasionally misrepresents it. spectrejournal.com/first-and-thir… 🧵 First, the misrepresentation. Camfield has chosen to frame the exchange between Huber and I as one between First and Third World eco-socialisms, of which I am apparently a representative of the latter.

I’ve said this before, but ecological politics today isn’t about ‘saving the planet’ or ‘solving the climate crisis’ as we used to be told. It isn’t even about staying within 1.5C of planetary heating. That’s over. It's gone. 1/4 Ecological politics is about limiting how many people die, how many are displaced, how many experience insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it’s about how many species and habitats will be lost forever. 2/4