On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  This is a phenomenon I have called the shock doctrine, the exploitation of wrenching crises to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite. We see this dismal cycle repeat again and again. We saw it after the 2008 financial crash. We are already seeing it in how the Tories are planning to exploit Brexit to push through disastrous pro-corporate trade deals without debate.

  The reason I am highlighting Puerto Rico is because the situation is so urgent. But also because it’s a microcosm of a much larger global crisis, one that contains many of the same overlapping elements: accelerating climate chaos; militarism; histories of colonialism; a weak and neglected public sphere; a totally dysfunctional democracy. And overlaying it all: the seemingly bottomless capacity to discount the lives of huge numbers of black and brown people. Ours is an age when it is impossible to pry one crisis apart from all the others. They have all merged, reinforcing and deepening one another like one shambling, multiheaded beast. I think it’s helpful to think of the current US president in much the same way.

  It’s tough to know how to adequately sum him up. So, let me try a local example. You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers, I believe you call it the “fatberg?” Well, Trump—he’s the political equivalent of that: a merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy, and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very, very hard to dislodge. It gets so grim that we have to laugh. But make no mistake: whether it’s climate change or the nuclear threat, Trump represents a crisis that could echo through geologic time.

  But here is my message to you today: Moments of crisis do not have to go the shock doctrine route—they do not need to become opportunities for the already obscenely wealthy to grab still more.

  They can also go the opposite way.

  They can be moments when we find our best selves, when we locate reserves of strength and focus that we never knew we had. We see it at the grassroots level every time disaster strikes. We all witnessed it in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower catastrophe.I When the people responsible were MIA, the community came together, held one another in their care, organized the donations, and advocated for the living (as well as the dead). And they are doing it still, more than one hundred days after the fire, when there is still no justice and, scandalously, only a handful of survivors have been rehoused.

  And it’s not only at the grassroots level that we see disaster awaken something remarkable in us. There is also a long and proud history of crises sparking progressive transformation on a society-wide scale. Think of the New Deal victories in the United States won by working people for social housing and old age pensions during the Great Depression. Or for the National Health Service in this country after the horrors of the Second World War.

  This should remind us that moments of great crisis and peril do not necessarily need to knock us backward. They can also catapult us forward.

  Our progressive ancestors achieved that at key moments in history. And we can do it again, in this moment when everything is on the line. But what we know from the Great Depression and the postwar period is that we never win these transformative victories by simply resisting, by simply saying no to the latest outrage.

  To win in a moment of true crisis, we also need a bold and forward-looking “yes,” a plan for how to rebuild and respond to the underlying causes of crisis. And that plan needs to be convincing, credible and, most of all, captivating. We have to help a weary and wary public to imagine itself into that better world.

  And that is why I am so honored to be standing with you today. Because in the last election, that’s exactly what the Labour Party did. Theresa May ran a cynical campaign based on exploiting fear and shock to grab more power for herself—first the fear of a bad Brexit deal, then the fear following the horrific terror attacks in Manchester and London. Your party and your leader, on the other hand, responded by focusing on root causes: a failed “war on terror,” economic inequality, and weakened democracy.

  But you did more than that.

  You presented voters with a bold and detailed manifesto, one that laid out a plan for millions of people to have tangibly better lives: free tuition, fully funded health care, aggressive climate action. After decades of lowered expectations and asphyxiated political imagination, finally voters had something hopeful and exciting to say yes to. And so many of them did just that, upending the projections of the entire expert class.II You proved that the era of triangulation and tinkering is over. The public is hungry for deep change—they are crying out for it. The trouble is, in far too many countries, it’s only the far right that is offering it, or seeming to, with that toxic combination of fake economic populism and very real racism.

  You showed us another way, one that speaks the language of decency and fairness; that names the true forces most responsible for this mess, no matter how powerful; and that is unafraid of some of the ideas we were told were gone for good. Like wealth redistribution. And nationalizing essential public services. Now, thanks to all your boldness, we know that this isn’t just a moral strategy. It can be a winning strategy. It fires up the base, and it activates constituencies that long ago stopped voting altogether.

  You showed us something else in the last election, too, and it’s just as important. You showed that political parties don’t need to fear the creativity and independence of social movements—and social movements, likewise, have a huge amount to gain from engaging with electoral politics.

  That’s a very big deal. Because let’s be honest: political parties tend to be a bit freakish about control. And real grassroots movements—we cherish our independence, and we’re pretty much impossible to control. But what we are seeing with the remarkable relationship between Labour and MomentumIII, and with other wonderful campaign organizations, is that it is possible to combine the best of both worlds. If we listen and learn from one another, we can create a force that is both stronger and nimbler than anything either parties or movements can pull off on their own.

  I want you to know that what you have done here is reverberating around the world. So many of us are watching your ongoing experiment in this new kind of politics with rapt attention. And, of course, what happened here is itself part of a global phenomenon. It’s a wave led by young people who came into adulthood just as the global financial system was collapsing and just as climate disruption was banging down the door.

  Many come out of social movements like Occupy Wall Street, and Spain’s Indignados. They began by saying no—to austerity, to bank bailouts, to wars and police violence, to fracking and pipelines. But they came to understand that the biggest challenge is overcoming the way neoliberalism has waged war on our collective imagination, on our ability to truly believe in anything outside its bleak borders.

  And so, these movements started to dream together, laying out bold and different visions of the future, and credible pathways out of crisis. And most important, they began engaging with political parties, to try to win power. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’s historic campaign in the 2016 US Democratic primaries, which was powered by Millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.

  In these cases and others, electoral campaigns caught fire with stunning speed, faster than any genuinely transformative political program has in either Europe or North America in my lifetime. But still, in each case, not close enough. So, in this time between elections, it’s worth thinking about how to make absolutely sure that next time, all our movements go all the way.

  A big part of the answer is: Keeping it up. Keep building that “yes.”

  But take it even farther.

  Outside the heat of a campaign, there is more time to deepen the relationships between issues and movements, so that our solutions address multiple crises at once. In all our countries, we can and must do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice, and gender injustice. We need to understand and explain
how all those ugly systems that place one group in a position of dominance over another (based on skin color, religious faith, gender, and sexual orientation) consistently serve the interests of power and money, and always have. They do it by keeping us divided, and keeping themselves protected.

  And we have to do more to keep it front of mind that we are in a state of climate emergency, the roots of which are found in the same system of bottomless greed that underlies our economic emergency. But states of emergency, let’s recall, can be catalysts for deep progressive victories.

  So, let’s draw out the connections between the gig economy, which treats human beings like a raw resource from which to extract wealth and then discard, and the dig economy, in which the extractive companies treat the earth with the very same disdain. And let’s show exactly how we can move from that gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care and repair; where the work of our caregivers and of our land and water protectors is respected and valued; a world where no one and nowhere is thrown away, whether in firetrap housing estates or on hurricane-ravaged islands.

  I applaud the clear stand Labour has taken against fracking and for clean energy. Now we need to up our ambition and show exactly how battling climate change is a once-in-a-century chance to build a fairer and more democratic economy. Because as we rapidly transition off fossil fuels, we cannot replicate the wealth concentration and the injustices of the oil and coal economy, in which hundreds of billions in profits have been privatized and the tremendous risks are socialized.

  We can and must design a system in which the polluters pay a very large share of the cost of transitioning off fossil fuels, and where we keep green energy in public and community hands. That way, revenues stay in your communities, to pay for child care and firefighters and other crucial services. And it’s the only way to make sure that the green jobs that are created are union jobs that pay a living wage.

  The motto needs to be “Leave the oil and gas in the ground, but leave no worker behind.” And the best part? You don’t need to wait until you get to Westminster to start this great transition. You can use the levers you have right now.

  You can turn your Labour-controlled cities into beacons for the world transformed. A good start would be divesting your pensions from fossil fuels and investing that money in low-carbon social housing and green-energy cooperatives. That way people can begin to experience the benefits of the next economy before the next election, and know in their bones that, yes, there is, and always has been, an alternative.

  In closing, I want to stress, as your international speaker at this convention, that none of this can be about turning any one nation into a progressive museum, or fortress. In wealthy countries like yours and mine, we need policies that reflect what we owe to the Global South, that own up to our role in destabilizing the economies and ecologies of poorer nations for a great many years.

  For instance, during this epic hurricane season, we’ve heard a lot of talk of the “British Virgin Islands,” the “Dutch Virgin Islands,” the “French Caribbean,” and so on. Rarely was it seen as relevant to observe that these are not reflections of where Europeans like to holiday. They are reflections of the fact that so much of the vast wealth of empire was extracted from these islands as a direct result of human bondage—wealth that supercharged Europe’s and North America’s Industrial Revolution, setting us up as the super-polluters we are today. And that is intimately connected to the fact that the very future of these island nations is now at grave risk from the triple-threat of superstorms, sea level rise, and dying coral reefs.

  What should this painful history mean to us today?

  It means welcoming migrants and refugees. And it means paying our fair share to help many more countries ramp up justice-based green transitions of their own. Trump going rogue is no excuse to demand less of ourselves in the United Kingdom and Canada or anywhere else, for that matter. It means the opposite: that we have to demand more of ourselves, to pick up the slack until the United States manages to get its sewer system unclogged.

  I firmly believe that all this work, challenging as it is, is a crucial part of the path to victory; that the more ambitious, consistent, and holistic you can be in painting a picture of the world transformed, the more credible a Labour government will become.

  Because you went and showed us all that you can win. Now you have to win.

  We all do.

  Winning is a moral imperative. The stakes are too high, and time is too short, to settle for anything less.

  * * *

  I. In June 2017, a fire broke out in a twenty-four-story public housing building in North Kensington, London, killing more than seventy people. Subsequent investigations found that various forms of neglect contributed to the building’s vulnerability to the flames, including plastic-filled siding, which had been installed to improve the look of the tower’s exterior but that proved to be hyperflammable; poorly maintained fire equipment; a broken ventilation system; and few escape routes.

  II. In the 2017 general elections, the Labour Party increased its share of votes by more than in any election since 1945. The Conservatives lost their majority but clung to power by forming a coalition with Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

  III. Momentum is a grassroots movement associated with the Labour Party that supports progressive candidates and pushes the party to the left.

  CAPITALISM KILLED OUR CLIMATE MOMENTUM, NOT “HUMAN NATURE”

  In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself.

  AUGUST 2018

  ON SUNDAY, THE ENTIRE NEW York Times magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history filled with insider revelations about roads not taken made me, on several occasions, swear out loud. And lest there be any question about the world-shattering magnitude of this failure, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China’s third-largest lake.

  The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn’t cut it as a compelling news story: “Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it—and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course, “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

  None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilization is a huge news story, unquestionably the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events. And if they did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the tangible solutions, the more they push their elected representatives to take bold action.

  Which is why it was so exciting to see the Times throw the full force of its editorial machine behind Rich’s opus—teasing it with a promotional video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Center, and providing accompanying educational materials. That’s also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis.

  According to Rich, between the years 1979 and 1989, the basic science of climate change was understood and accepted, the partisan divide over the issue had yet to cleave, the fossil fuel companies hadn’t started their misinformation campaign in earnest, and there was a great deal of
global political momentum toward a bold and binding international emissions reduction agreement. Writing of the key period at the end of the 1980s, Rich says, “The conditions for success could not have been more favorable.”

  And yet we blew it—“we” being humans, who apparently are just too shortsighted to safeguard our own future. Just in case we missed the point of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now “losing earth,” Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

  Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the US government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason was that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?)

  Many climate scientists and historians have pointed out this misreading since the piece went online.I Others have remarked on the maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe a screamingly homogenous group of US power players. Throughout Rich’s accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, somehow able to care about future generations despite being human. The voices of women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as sightings of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker, and when we ladies do appear, it is mainly as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men.

  All these flaws have been well covered, so I won’t rehash them here. My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face-to-face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet. Why? Because the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought.