Capital Moves Faster than Community

A realization, a fear, a possibility that grassroots activism may fall short in the climate crisis.

A journey of a struggling anti-capitalist environmentalist

Disclaimer: As someone removed from the organizing space, I can only theorize and in no way want to degrade or take away from the amazing work being done by communities across the world and committed activists in the movement for liberation. I’m just sharing some struggles of mine as I wrap my head around theories of change.

There have been few intellectual tensions in my Duke experiences comparable to

1) my inclination for climate action and

2) my commitment to environmental justice, given my belief that

3) capitalism is structurally positioned to destroy the living world and perhaps our own value systems in it. 

Yet, as I’ve considered my path after Duke as well as reflected on my role within this greater system, I’ve oscillated between believing that I’ve found a balance between these three poles and the realization that I am more clueless than ever. My journey led me to teach a half-credit course showing that the fundamental qualities of inequality, economic growth, and alienation require prioritizing economic models such as degrowth, community-based economics and the localization of economies, and greater amounts of participatory democracy. These were authentic structures that would solve the exploitative consumption of capitalism from our lifeworld (Habermas, Gorz 2007), but, of course, with their own problems. There’s the political problem, that we may never be able to convince people that a world without growth is a world of abundance (though Jason Hickel has come close). There are structural uncertainties, such as that democracy is flawed and large-scale societies may ultimately need market simplifications to get anything done. And then there’s the problem of transition—that there’s no real economic path that gets us out of the economic growth trap brought by neoliberal globalization, finance, and debt. I figured all of these out, but I still believed in the merits of anti-capitalist thought.

My journey took me to the fundamental tensions between climate action and environmental justice. We need to decarbonize the economy as quickly as possible, with large-scale, coordinated action. This requires powerful actors like the State (sorry, anarchist self), corporations with capital and know-how (sorry, democratization-proposing self) to coordinate action across regions, states, and countries, with billions of dollars at stake. There’s no substantive opportunity for a community energy transition. For all the talk about micro-grids and community-controlled renewable energy (which we should promote), there are logistical necessities under a growing U.S. economy to have large-scale transmission lines and energy plants. We need to build big if we want to be serious about providing enough clean electricity for society. And this isn’t just a U.S. case. In fact, across the globe, the idea of utilitarian-endorsed community sacrifice can be more pernicious. In Costa Rica, I explored how even a progressive government was willing to sacrifice its indigenous people to produce hydroelectric energy, because the goal of producing enough clean energy at scale required a minority to be sacrificed. This mega-project, El Diquís, was ultimately stopped after years of pre-development. Yet if not one mega-project due to the resistance of one community, there shall be others.

There is always a sacrifice zone in climate action.

I came to different conclusions in each of the cases I analyzed regarding national development and community protection. In a case like the U.S., I believed that there were actionable ways to drive public policy to be more democratic and include mechanisms for consultation and the sharing of benefits with communities. In the case of El Diquís, I ultimately ruled that true environmental justice sometimes means rejecting utilitarian goals in favor of marginalized communities.

And that’s a key part of what I’m getting to. That climate action will benefit everyone. But it will undoubtedly hurt many people that have already been hurt.

My journey took me to Spain, where I found myself in a political philosophy class exploring the crisis of the left. There are many culprits, per social theorists. As Mark Fisher so brilliantly shows in Capitalist Realism, capitalism has had the ability to capture countercultural critiques and incorporate them under the banner of capitalism, wiping out the ability to dream of futures beyond. As Wendy Brown articulates in Wounded Attachments, we are stuck in our own identity groups, subject to criticizing Power more broadly but unable to build coalitions among different identities to construct new identities together. Perhaps, this is because capitalism has only created structures to engage in single issues (ex. ???) that don’t touch on broader Marxist or Anarchist themes of power and control. We can’t imagine the end of capitalism, because capitalism can transform demands into partial concessions without demanding a conversation about cultural transformation. The left has failed to come up with a national, or global vision of change, because the easiest thing to do is resist at the local level. We haven’t been able to find a global enemy or a source of global hope.

That brought me to this year, coming off of a summer working for RMI, a mainstream decarbonization think-tank. My experience showed me the appeal and power of the market. Sure, it generates wealth for those who participate in it, but it also has the power to shape behavior as we currently structure it. If we are all consumers and producers, why not work on making markets more conducive to sustainability, aligning incentives, on “derisking”?

And finally, I come to the present moment.

I sit on a shaded wooden bench, mesmerized at the beauty of fall foliage that has been given time to grow into a mighty ecosystem. This forest has been cared for by man, but nature has done most of the work through millions of tiny interactions. Self-interest may drive scavengers to eat the dead, but nature’s reciprocity returns the nutrients to future generations. Competition may lead one tree to tower over the rest, but it is a community that protects all from merciless weather patterns or predatory pests. There is a balance, a slow growth, a regeneration of what was into what will be, paid for by respect to the indescribable, decentralized web imbuing organisms with freedom and structure.

We have tried to replicate nature’s beauty and resilience through biomimicry, smart cities, green roofs, and whatever technological material exception is built sparsely sandwiched within, around, and between urban jungles and carved industrial farmland. But it’s a slow process. Nature is a decentralized anarchist democracy, relying on the stability of complexity to build and prosper. In contrast, humans have installed an autocratic extractivist dictatorship over this planet. Call it the Anthropocene, man’s domination over nature, or modern development. We have elected speed over stability, the rush of hedging bets on futures rather than paying homage to patterns that have become before us. Call it capitalism, free markets, or economic growth. We know that we have sacrificed planetary boundaries for private gain, enclosed commons for private wealth, and excavated landscapes in far-off places to fuel capital’s unending search for energy, whether material or human. In short, we’ve enslaved nature for man’s benefit. Not the benefit for all men, but the market man.

The market man is the producer, owner, consumer, who has benefitted from capital’s ascent. It is the dreamer seeking to commercialize an idea, the rentier craving dominion over property and people, and the individual in all of us seeking to transactionalize our lives further through impersonal purchases at the supermarket or Amazon.com. In essence, the market man agrees to submit himself to the market’s whim in order to gain its surplus splendor in the form of cheap consumer goods, private wealth, and, ultimately, power over others. Although we have enslaved nature as market men through undemocratic means, we willingly give ourselves to the organized chaos of supply and demand.

We have expanded the market to much more than consumers and producers. We are all market men, whether we’re investors scaling early innovations or leeching off corporate acquisitions and merger deals; non-profits clawing for market scraps to bandage market failures and externalities; or even the state policing market rules of private property and free trade. There are hundreds of variations of the market-man complex across the world, but they all follow a similar story:

·      We have enslaved nature, priced it, sold it

·      We have created autocratic structures to enforce market rules, even if that has meant reducing human capacities to becoming solely market-related actors

·      We have generated vast amounts of wealth, albeit with inequality, that has arguably improved humanity’s well-being over time from a utilitarian perspective.

·      We have accepted the market-man as intrinsic within ourselves and the impossibility of alternatives to capitalism.

Why does this matter?

It’s clear that capital accumulation has destroyed nature, our relationships to the living world, and it is now starting to produce ecological catastrophe that threatens human life through climate change.

Yet, as I’ll argue in this piece, utopian visions of returning to nature’s small-scale complexity and democratic anarchy may be impossible given the timescale of the climate crisis. We may be stuck with the market-man magician’s bag of tricks, of continual economic growth and private wealth accumulation. If this is the case, I’m afraid that the left does not know how to contend with the necessity to grab power to drive the market rather than renounce it in the hopes of destroying a complex that has already conquered us.

One of the threads that demonstrates this impossible choice the most clearly is the tension between building an environmental justice movement and swiftly addressing the climate crisis.

I must consider the benefits of such a utopia driven by decentralized, democratic anarchy, which is brilliantly captured by ideas such as An Architecture of Abundance and Journey to Earthland. While listening to Reverend Bill Kearney, one of the pioneers of the Warren County protests in 1982 that birthed the U.S. EJ movement, I was inspired by the power of relational organizing. As Kearney explained, the movement's success came from its ability to inspire community members to see themselves as agents of change, as caretakers of a community. At its core, EJ and other powerful movements have been about creating internal transformations with individuals. EJ is about resistance, and usually resistance to the expansion of capital. In successful cases, advocacy can halt capital and incorporate legal and moral considerations that hinder capital’s path to building more waste pits in black communities or usurping local economies through intensive, extractive, and temporary job opportunities, such as protests against transnational pipelines. A successful EJ movement changes the individual from a market-man to an actor on behalf of the collective. If we are to restore humanity, is it not by replicating nature’s beautiful complexity and supporting one another like trees in a forest, like mycelium roots thriving through mutual aid?

It's an inspiring message, and it is one that has captivated me as I’ve grown to learn about the EJ movement. However, it doesn’t change the fact that capital will move to the next place where resistance has not been established and create more efficient waste practices that reduce the number of waste pits yet still externalize harms upon nature or other communities.

One community’s fight may protect 10,000 people, but it won’t affect the trillions of dollars dealt impersonally by the market-man.

What I’m getting at is the intractable problem of scale, that capital needs an equally monumental adversary to challenge its pursuits. If we were to take this threat seriously from the environmental justice lens, it demands that we create an EJ narrative that builds rather than resists. For every manifestation of a community successfully halting the construction of a fossil fuel plant, we need a nationwide campaign for a jobs guarantee, a Green New Deal, and a tangible policy mission that posits a hopeful future. I must note that this is a privileged thing to ask, of course, but accomplishing this would allow us to transform community sentiment into a national narrative. A movement that builds thus changes the discourse of what’s possible and crates a common moral sentiment that can attract different identities to something greater. Conversations of intersectional climate justice get close to this ideal. 

We can see change occurring at the national level—the White House’s Justice40 initiative, EJ Screen Tool, and low-income provisions in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund are just some examples demonstrating the state's role in carving out EJ provisions within its market-man state capacity. Yet, as Gunn-Wright shows in “The Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind,” such provisions are mere fractions of the larger role of the state when it comes to social and climate policy—de-risking technologies and smoothing out the tracks so that capital can venture further into aligning private profit with social good. This is a worthy task, but as I explained before, the very task of capital is to exploit the material and immaterial resources of this planet, while untouched the question of how humanity should realize a shift in moral sentiment that respects the planet.

A real EJ movement that builds would be fractal and relational and would connect communities as they resist problems and create their own visions of sustainable, just futures. However, it may never overcome the market man, because, after all, Capital moves faster than community.

The climate crisis becomes our new focus point, given the contradictions between environmental justice’s inherent value and capital’s unending power over the environmental politic. Currently, the market-man doesn’t seem to budge to align with climate goals. Capital is still doing what it always does—chasing short-term gain and exploitation over long-term prosperity. But there is a segment of market-men that want to use markets to accomplish social good. They want to

·      Account for ESG-related positive and negative externalities in stock prices

·      Derisk clean, yet risky technologies

·      Dedicate portions of capital to socially good causes in the climate and health space.

To the market man, the climate crisis is a matter of aligning incentives. An example like Social Alpha VC in India demonstrates its potential—that equalizing access to capital and markets may contribute to socially positive outcomes and reduce inequalities. After all, if capital can drive a green technological revolution without changing the hearts of individuals, why shouldn’t we accept it? It does not demand a moral transformation within us to buy a heat pump. Then again, this choice perpetuates our servitude to an autocracy of ensuring market freedom, serving the market, and subjugating ourselves to power grabs for capital. It relies on our self-interest, and it never demands us to consider reciprocity or community care.

However, doesn’t the climate crisis demand that we acquiesce to capital if we can reduce emissions as quickly as possible? Do we really have time to democratically plan and change the individual, to resist and then build an EJ narrative that reaches everyone, to build the capacity of organizing, complexity, self-sufficiency, and anarchism?

Isn’t it foolish, and selfish of us on the left to reject power and capital because we hold higher ideals? Perhaps, we must align incentives, scale market forces, and embrace the speed of capital, even if it furthers our loss of humanity itself?

I’m not saying yes, but I think it’s something we as people that care need to consider more thoughtfully.

The last thing I want to do is discount the role of organizing. Organizing over decades holds capital accountable, whether it influences public policy and regulation, redirects investment with better criteria, or raises public consciousness. I’m just struggling how to hold that in tension with the power of working strictly within markets to decarbonize (which Kyle Whyte may vehemently disagree with in Too late for indigenous climate justice).  

To unfinished thoughts and the fleeting of optimism.