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The science on emissions and climate change has been fairly accurate since at least the 1970s, and internationally known and acknowledged since the early 1990s. The UN’s climate framework, which makes clear what needs to be done, has been in effect since 1994. States have spent the three decades since essentially wasting time, trying and failing to make sustainability more immediately profitable than destruction.

It may have been possible at the time to save both capitalism and the planet, in theory. But this would require directly assaulting fossil fuel fortunes, making them unprofitable or even worthless by means of state intervention. Capitalism as a whole could have continued, perhaps, simply using different sources of energy and different avenues for investment. But theory aside, this was never practically attainable within the liberal order.

Despite the liberal pretension to enabling reasoned debate to set public policy, this kind of action was – and still is – deemed unconscionable, because the liberal system is in fact set up to allow those controlling massive wealth to protect their property. Wherever public power threatens private profits, the wealthy can mobilize their wealth in the legal, political, and public realm, and nip the threat in the bud.

These battles have gone on for decades while all of the “reasonable,” “serious” people insisted that only gradual, market-based efforts could ever work, pinning much hope on future technological innovations. But the market has other priorities, above all to make whatever profits can be made; rather than pave the way to a sustainable future, energy-related innovation has largely focused on better ways to locate, extract, refine, market, burn, and use fossil fuels – the market in its infinite wisdom has willed it to be so. And why should it not? As far as securing profits is concerned, juicing a tried-and-true source of revenue like fossil fuels is obviously a better investment than exploring avenues where profitability is just one of many open questions.

A world in flames

For decades, in other words, capitalism has been proving its inability to respond to anything but near-term profitability, while the political system supporting it has been proving its complete inability to temper this near-sightedness with reason or concern for the public interest.

And now we find ourselves in a world literally up in flames, with short- and long-term threats to civilization converging across all continents – and the liberal-capitalist system continues to display an utter inability to do what needs to be done.

The science, having been generally clear for half a century, is now more detailed and unassailable than perhaps any other area of science has ever been before.

Politicians, trapped in the mind-prison of Liberalism and the golden cage of capitalism, continue to mutter “but what do you propose?” And no wonder: any effective action would ultimately require pursuing the economically insane aim of preventing private firms and state enterprises from making profits from highly valuable natural resources, materials which are just lying there, waiting to be turned into money.

Whether fossil fuel reserves are owned by private individuals, corporations, or the state itself, denying their ability to do this would entail a massive showdown with vested interests, the kind of thing that prudent politicians generally avoid.

In this way, the intrinsic irrationality of an economic system predicated on infinite growth, along with the massive concentration of wealth and power it has promoted, now stand in the way of common-sense rational action based on an irrefutable scientific consensus.

Listen to the science!

If you did not already reject capitalism to begin with, you might at this point be irritated. I am obviously biased and presenting the story in a way that serves my pre-existing communist agenda. Be this as it may, the science is clear: just read the IPCC reports.

These reports, compiled by volunteer scientists based on thousands of studies, and approved line for line by hundreds of representatives from nearly every government in the world, spell this out as clearly as can be. In the crucial 2018 report, they call for “rapid and far-reaching transitions,” about which they say: “These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.”

On the pivotal topic of fossil fuels, they write: “Some fossil investments made over the next few years – or those made in the last few – will likely need to be retired prior to fully recovering their capital investment or before the end of their operational lifetime.”

The International Energy Agency – originally an oil industry lobby group – has since piled on, calling for an immediate global stop to investment in new fossil fuel supply.

How to strand an asset

If you believe this is possible within capitalism, without violating private property, let us think this through. Consider the fact that about a sixth of the world’s wealth is invested in fossil fuels. How do you suppose we are to retire these investments, across the globe, before they even recover the initial costs, let alone turn a profit?

Do you expect the owners of these investments – including fabulously wealthy individuals, royal families, democratic states, dictatorial states, and of course corporations bound to shareholder profits – to simply come to their senses now, after four decades, and voluntarily forfeit this wealth? The corporations in question are legally barred from doing so, while the individuals and leaders in question would be objectively irrational to do it – they would be, simply put, destroying billions and trillions of dollars in value.

Yes, I am a communist, and have been since before I started down the climate rabbit hole. Nonetheless, I truly wish this weren’t so. I truly wish capitalism could continue to exist without destroying the climate, if only to give the left more time to organize to overthrow it.

But unfortunately for all of us, whether left, right, or oh-so enlightened center, time is running out. The current state of things is utterly unsustainable, and if there is any way out still conceivable, even any way to significantly mitigate the damage – it is being blocked by liberal ideology and capitalist economics.

Seriously reviewing the science and the history of this crisis makes any other conclusion untenable.

Here’s why:
There are two basic positions Jewish people have put forward regarding our liberation in a world dominated by those who have marginalized, exploited, and harmed us:

• Position A says we must band together with other oppressed people everywhere to dismantle the systems oppressing us.
• Position B says instead we have to gather together, away from gentile oppressors, and set up our own system to protect and promote our interests.

A is obviously a Leftist project, B is at the very least a rejection of basic Leftist aspirations — equality, fraternity, and liberty — as it rejects the notion that Jewish people can or should make common cause with their non-Jewish compatriots to attain equality.

Furthermore, Position A (Jewish Leftism) rejects the nation state, identifying it as a site of our own oppression and the oppression of others.

Position B (Zionism) meanwhile embraces the nation state (be it as a Good or as a Lesser Evil), operating on the assumption that someone has to be on top, so we should at least create a space where it’s us.

A tiny bit of history

Before the Holocaust, Zionism was the minority political movement within Jewish communities, while Jewish Leftism was vibrant and widespread. (Of course, there were also non-political Jewish people who pursued neither, in some places seeking to quietly assimilate among the majority without organizing politically with other Jews as Jews.)

But Jewish Leftists in Europe tended to stay and fight while Zionists generally fled to Palestine and elsewhere. After the mass murder of our people, much of the Jewish Left was physically gone, the survivors scattered and disorganized, while Zionism came out stronger than ever, both because its centers of power (mainly the Yishuv in Palestine) were thankfully spared from the annihilation, and because in the carnage of the War and Holocaust, many people (of all backgrounds, everywhere) gravitated towards nationalistic thinking.

Answering the Right’s question

The Jewish world has since been overwhelmingly dominated by Zionist thought and organization, to the point that for many in Israel and abroad, going further Left than progressive liberal Zionism has not been seen as an option at all. But the left flank of a right-wing movement is still right, not left.

Whatever values and ideas may be added on in a specific ideology, stream, or movement, the core of Zionism remains right-wing. The basic question it answers is the antisemitic/nationalist “Jewish Question” – should Jewish people live among non-Jewish people?
Zionism answers as antisemites do: NO.

We can have compassion for those whose world view was formed through the 20th century, and understand why they adopted such a reactionary, self-hating point of view as Zionism, but we still have to reject it.

We still have to say, our answer is YES. Wherever we live, there we belong!

Many leftists I have met both online and in real life — myself certainly included — now spend a great deal of time and effort carefully choosing what brands to buy from. Someone I follow on Twitter, for instance, quipped earlier that on the one hand, IKEA was founded by a Nazi sympathizer, but on the other, he’s a student and needs to furnish an apartment. I consider this dilemma a no-brainer, as the IKEA table my keyboard rests on will readily attest.

Replacing the convenient omnipresence of such giants as IKEA (or Amazon) is no mean feat, especially on the kind of budget most people have to deal with. But that energy — and money, which costs working people oodles of energy — would be better spent more actively struggling against any one of these industry giants, rather than diffusely depriving each of a profit margin here and there.

Don’t get me wrong — boycotts are undoubtedly a powerful tool of political action. The boycott has proven itself time and again and I am by no means calling on the left to abandon the boycott. I’m not talking about boycotts at all. Individually cherry-picking your consumption is not a boycott. A boycott — an effective boycott, at any rate — is an organized action, rooted in organizations and networks with the mass to give it economic weight, enforced by collective mutual discipline to make it count, and backed by concrete demands voiced by organizers so that the boycotted entity has the possibility of caving in and handing them a victory.

A few leftists taking their business elsewhere will never change the politics of IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dead. His competitors in affordable furniture, who by necessity must employ many people and cut many corners to keep prices low, are far likelier to be Nazi sympathizers (or at least conservatives) than they are to be any kind of leftists.

There is in fact something deeply detached from leftist analysis in even looking at the specific moral and political failings of large businesses and their owners. The jury is already in on their moral and political stature, and shocking as they might find it, they are without a single exception exploitative, immoral reprobates, whose success is made possible only by fleecing the very people on whom it depends. And this is not their personal fault nor failing, it is how the system is set up. If they stray too far from amorally sapping the productivity of thousands of working people, they will be out-competed — and this too will not be changed by a handful of well-meaning middle-income folks choosing to do business with them.

Leftist…Neoliberalism?!

While this approach to consumption is completely alien to any kind of leftist analysis of the market society, it is perfectly in tune with the right-wing’s most well-funded and entrenched alternative theory: neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism holds that consumer choice is a pure expression of democracy. In fact, neoliberalism seems to put forward the notion that consumer choice is democracy, more so than actual democratic decision-making. After all, neoliberalism denounces most or all attempts by democratic states to limit private enterprise (such as pesky environmental or consumer safety regulation) or influence consumer preference (such as rating and labelling schemes) — often citing the consumer’s freedom to choose harmful products, seemingly assigning this dubious freedom more importance than the democratic process itself.

Through a neoliberal lense, consumer choice is not only an appropriate avenue for affecting social change, it is the appropriate avenue for any such attempt. Anything else, neoliberalism will hold, would be pure coercion. And questioning the system itself? Why, “there is no alternative.”

The architects of neoliberalism would be, and likely are, overjoyed to see leftists focusing such efforts on choosing the “best companies” to buy from, rather than organizing to shut down the abusive practices common to most if not all points of production in the market economy. This is an absolute victory in their attempt to restore the balance of class power to approximately how it was a century ago, before revolution, world war, and cold war/post-war compromise put the owning class on the defensive. After all, if the left is busy choosing who to buy from, the worst that could happen is a corporation or two shutting down (and that’s quite a long shot). The system making the rich richer still remains firmly in place, no danger in sight.

Speaking of the rich getting richer, let us remember the fatal flaw in neoliberalism from a social justice perspective: If money is the primary avenue of political expression, the poor — whether or not they keep getting poorer — are effectively disenfranchised. Our game of “find the least awful scoundrel to give your money to” will never be relevant to the interests of those with little money or energy to spare for such lofty considerations, to those whose primary concern is feeding themselves and their families and making it through another day, another week, under the grindstone of economic growth.

So by all means, organize boycotts. Boycott companies, boycott multinationals, boycott entire industries — but do so within an organized campaign, with goals, structures, and discipline. The rest of the time, don’t give your individual time and energy to the market’s “self-correction” efforts when you could much better spend them building alternatives to the dictatorship of the market — or attacking it in ways that hurt, rather than help it.

Post originally located at https://write.as/meemsaf/ethical-shopping-neoliberalisms-greatest-victory