Fear Of Passivity

Climate Change in Perspective:
From The European Philosophical Gaze:
AUGUST 16, 2015

Fear Of Passivity
At times Zizek suggests that it's better to do nothing. This doing nothing resonates with a certain passivity, perhaps better described as impassivity. With climate change, is it the case that passivity is what is feared?

For the post-Cold War generation, the primary global threat comes not from action, but inaction. Last year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science warned that within a few decades, climate change will have “massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems,” including widespread famines, lethal heat waves, more frequent and destructive natural disasters, and social unrest. Despite the litany of warnings like these, governments have utterly failed to take meaningful action.
At this point, climate change can be limited or accelerated, and humans can adapt to some degree, but significant damage to the planetary ecosystem can no longer be averted.
Perspectives:

WHY IS it so difficult for them to come up with a serious proposal that will actually make a difference to the climate situation?
FUNDAMENTALLY, GOVERNMENT negotiators say "we'll reduce emissions," but they don't say "we will reduce our use of fossil fuels," which is what they must do to reduce emissions seriously and long term.
Fossil fuels are so fundamental to the operation of capitalism and the world today that serious reductions, if they were even tried under capitalism, would lead to a period of extraordinary economic disruption. Entire industries would have to stop functioning while they retool, and other industries would just have to disappear.

The only time we've had significant reductions in emissions in a major country was after the break-up of the Soviet Union, when the economy of Russia collapsed. And even that didn't produce the level of emissions reductions we'd like to see. So the difficulty in reaching agreement is, ultimately, that they aren't willing to reorient their economies away from fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are embedded in the way capitalism works.

A Socialist View to CC:

WHAT WOULD radical action really look like? One of the debates in the movement has been about growth vs. de-growth. Some people argue that any kind of growth of the economy is ruled out by the danger of climate change, and that we have to move to a simpler kind of social organization, simpler technology and so on. What do you make of that debate?
THE DE-GROWTH movement is mostly in Europe, mainly in France. It includes some good people doing very good analysis of the problems. The difficulty is that they focus on growth as an abstraction--it's just "bigger is bad." Instead of targeting the kind of growth that you get in a system that's based on commodity production and on capital accumulation, they seem just to be against "more stuff."
To save the planet, we have to stop some significant things. Two really good immediate steps would be shut down the armed forces and stop all advertising. Both of those are trillion-dollar-a-year items. Any government that was really committed to stopping environmental destruction would take those steps. You could call that de-growth--stop doing the things that are causing the damage.
On the other hand, we are never going to build a global movement unless we recognize and accept that two-thirds of the world actually needs "more stuff." For example, we need to make access to electricity in every home a basic right. That's going to require building a lot of solar panels and other equipment. There is no way around that. So focusing on reducing or stopping growth in the abstract doesn't get us very far.
YOU WERE one of the early proponents of eco-socialism. What exactly is eco-socialism? What type of contribution do you see eco-socialists making to the environmental movement?
IN EVERY talk that I've ever given on eco-socialism, I've said that there is no trademark on the word. The range of opinions about what constitutes eco-socialism is very broad--just like the range of opinions about what constitutes socialism.

Think of all the different variations of socialism you've heard of, and then add all the variations of ecology to that. There are green social democrats and green anarchists and green revolutionary Marxists. There are even a few hard-core Malthusians who call themselves eco-socialists: I think they're mistaken, but that's their opinion.
Eco-socialism is three different things.

First, it's a goal--a society in which capitalism no longer dominates and which places a high priority on repairing the ecological damage that has been done and ensuring that we don't do any more.

Second, it's a body of ideas. In that respect, John Bellamy Foster talks about first-stage and second-stage eco-socialism. The first wave, in the 1990s, attempted to combine green political thought and Marxism. Some very important analysis resulted, but also a lot that was politically incoherent, because there are areas in which Marxism and traditional green political thought are not, ultimately, compatible.

The second wave really began with two books published in 1999 and 2000-- Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature and John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology. They both, in different ways, asked, "What did Marx actually have to say about humanity's relationship with nature in capitalist society?" They showed that Marx said an awful lot more about ecology than most 20th century Marxists thought he did, let alone than what greens thought. That led, most notably, to metabolic rift theory, which some environmentalists are now using to understand specific environmental problems.

The third thing is that eco-socialism is a movement. It includes a fair range of opinion, but fundamentally, it's composed of people who agree that there's no ecological revolution that isn't socialist, and there's no socialist revolution that isn't ecological.
For Marxists, eco-socialism involves the recognition that the environmental/ecological question is the most important problem that we face in the 21st century: If we don't recognize its centrality, our politics will be irrelevant.

Marx famously said that people make their own history, but not under conditions of their choosing. This is a concrete example--changing the world in the context of impending environmental disaster. Marx didn't expect that, but that's our reality. The way we build socialism, the kind of socialism we will be able to build, will be fundamentally shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on