Over the last few years Bill McKibben has become a regular guest on Democracy Now. Apparently, the Middlebury College professor and co-founder of 350.org and is their go-to expert for discussions of the climate crisis. So what did he have to say last week about rising gas prices and the war in Ukraine?
As usual, a whole lot of nothing. The interview began with McKibben taking shots at the fossil fuel industry, specifically at the executives of companies like Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil who recently testified in front of Congress, accusing them of being greedy and corrupt. He then went on to discuss the “Windfall Tax Act,” a bill proposed by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that would put a tax on fossil fuel companies and give around $250 to every American to help ease pain at the pump. What would this accomplish? According to McKibben, besides giving Americans relief (in the form a quite paltry sum) from high gas prices, it would also “take some of that excess money out of the hands of the fossil fuel industry” so that they could no longer “buy Congress.”
McKibben’s central assumption here is that money is corrupting our otherwise unproblematic “democracy.” Setting aside the entirely absurd idea that taxes imposed on fossil fuel companies would come directly out of their lobbying budgets, this assumption is ludicrous still because it does not fully comprehend the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Democracy is, in McKibben’s view, a form of political organization that is capable of controlling capitalism. In reality, democracy is no more than a charade that allows society to believe it has control over dynamics that are already blindly predetermined by capitalism. In other words, far from determining how society is organized, democracy is, at its core, only ever capable of determining how capitalism can most effectively be reproduced at any given time. This means that the money given to politicians by companies is only a matter of secondary importance. Regardless of which politician is getting money and from whom, any policy that gets enacted must conform, or at the very least not severely disrupt, the process of capital accumulation. That is why this tax bill has no hope of getting anywhere on Capitol Hill. Its introduction, as is the case with most progressive legislation, remains an act of pure symbolism.
McKibben’s portion of the interview closes with him referencing a statement made by UN Secretary General António Guterres (whose power rivals that of the general manager at your local McDonalds) a few days earlier in which he called investment in fossil fuels “economically and morally insane,” in order to suggest that at the end of the year people with credit cards from the banks that invest in new fossil fuel developments should cut them up as an act of protest. What a bold suggestion! Any critique of fossil fuel development from the perspective of “sanity” is doomed to fail because it does not recognize the inherent insanity of capitalism. To say that fossil fuels are a bad investment is to completely ignore the imperatives of the capitalist mode of production. “The show must go on,” even more so during times of crisis when opportunities for the valorization of capital are harder and harder to come by, which means there’s no time to stop and think about what the consequences of further fossil fuel development might be. The only thing rivaling the insanity of this way of life is the idea that people cutting up their credit cards will accomplish anything.
In McKibben’s eyes, what we are seeing now in terms of the climate crisis and rising gas prices is the result of greedy individuals who only care about “padding their profits.” Left out of the discussion is any talk of the capitalist social formation that subjugates humans and nature to turn money into more money by any means necessary, let alone the fundamental crisis of this system which intensifies these dynamics even further. McKibben’s stance is representative of the larger dynamic among leftists to blame everything on individuals and institutions with “bad morals” and leave unquestioned the conditions in which these actors emerge. Everywhere you look, criticism is directed towards “greedy” executives and “shady” bankers, and not the social system in which they (and we) exist. Nothing is said of the irrational mode of production that compels us to sell ourselves to the highest bidder for the purpose of creating abstract wealth or its corresponding political form. All of the focus lies on discussions of personal “interest,” which is a direct result of the theoretical environment created by the Marxism of the early twentieth century, which only knew capitalism as the system in which the working class was robbed of their fair share in an otherwise unproblematic or even natural process (labor).
This line of thought can only ever lead to solutions immanent to capitalism which take for granted its most basic presuppositions. In this state of delusion, the Middlebury Madman and countless others like him can only ever whine about the need for state intervention (which will never come) and call upon others to undertake idiotic symbolic acts (like cutting up your credit card). To transcend capitalism, a goal more urgent than ever given the state of the environment, a critique is needed that calls into question its foundational institutions, such as labor, democracy, markets, etc. Without this we are as good as dead. After all, not many of us have the luxury of working for one of the most expensive private universities in the US.
Oliver Blackwell 