In arguing this, I am by no means implying support for simplistic views (such as we find in Biblical and Enlightenment writings) on the right of human beings to exploit the natural world in whatever ways they see fit. I am insisting only that there are properties and powers exclusive to humans, which require us to demarcate clearly between ourselves and other animate beings. The same applies a fortiori in the case of inanimate beings (or objects).We can agree with Latour and the new materialists that objects can have major formative influence on humans and can generate their own consequences. But this is very different from imputing human powers of agency. I dispute the wisdom of those who have lately positioned themselves as friends of nature precisely by denying the subject–object, nature–culture and human–animal distinctions. I am also quarrelling with those who insist on the importance of a redemptive awakening to human continuity with nature, rather than on the (often grim) exceptionality of human economic and social practice. Indeed, if human forms of consciousness and agency are on a par with those of the rest of nature, then no special responsibility for ecological collapse can be attributed to humans, and no eco-political strategies for redemption can be expected of them. Paradoxical as it may seem, the belief that humans occupy no special place in nature is likely to confound rather than advance the ecological cause. As Hornborg argues, the most problematic implication of attempts to dissolve the subject–object distinction
is finally not the fetishistic attribution of agency to non-living entities, but the withdrawal of responsibility and accountability from human subjects. The denial of accountability in human subjects – accomplished by putting them on a par with non-humans – is quite congruent with the relinquishment of responsibility that is implicit in the posthumanist stance of Latour and his followers. The uniqueness of human responsibility – which simply cannot be extended to rivers, volcanoes, or even dogs – remains an insurmountable dilemma for posthumanism.40
The assimilation of humans to other animals in terms of their needs and desires (a reductive naturalisation of their consumption) is also an inadequate basis for thinking through the alternative modes of consumption essential to guaranteeing a sustainable future. Non-human animals may emulate each other, and some of them certainly observe their pecking orders, but they do not consume for display or symbolic reasons. They may be deceived in their quests for satisfaction, but non-human animals do not pursue fantastical pleasures, nor are they interested in dissatisfaction as itself a condition of enjoyment. Human consumption, by contrast, is of a two-fold and over-determined character, developed in relation to both needs for physical survival and reproduction and to the more transcendent needs of the spirit (currently much deflected and confounded). What is more, the material objects of human consumption – unlike those of other animals, especially animals in the wild – are seldom stable, but constantly mutating. In consumer culture what we consume has become ever more various, numerous and baroque. Hence my dissent from the suggestion that consumerism’s negative consequences can be corrected by a simple ‘return’ to a naturally fixed and objectively knowable system of need satisfaction. But hence, too, my quarrel with those who tend to treat capitalist consumer culture as if it were the only form in which these distinctive qualities of human consumption could be accommodated; my quarrel, in other words, with those who are inclined to treat it as a natural development.
De-naturalising consumption
I suggested at the outset that Marxist approaches to industrial history are of critical importance in exposing both the distinctive role of capitalism in propelling global warming and environmental degradation, and the various ideological moves that continue to secure its disastrous hegemony. But if Marxism is to avoid becoming merely a historical reflection on what has gone wrong, it surely also needs to provide some guidance on how to put things right – guidance about what could or should replace the capitalist order, and about the forces that might help to promote that. In claiming this, I accept how dire the current situation seems, and how difficult it is to feel anything but pessimistic about the potential for transformation. The reluctance of much contemporary Marxist commentary to speculate on post-capitalist arrangements or on the politics and agents of transition is in this sense understandable. Yet as David Harvey has suggested, the fact that it is precisely because we have been told for so long that there is no post-capitalist alternative that it becomes important to envisage one.41 A Marxism that can summon no resources for thinking beyond capitalism succumbs to fatalism and thus to a form of idealism that espouses critical ideals which have no basis in reality. The reluctance to confront working-class opposition to socialism, if unsurprising, evades the all-important question as to who might now assume the transformative role that classical Marxism assigned to the proletariat.
I also want to suggest that Marxism today cannot continue to abstract from the role of consumption (including that by the metropolitan working-class) in sustaining capitalism and hence from its contribution to climate change. There is surely a striking contrast between the immiseration of workers in the nineteenth century and the much greater access of the work-force in contemporary industrialised societies to the commodities created through mass production: the now almost universal consumption of cars, air travel, electronic and white goods, home improvements, fashion items and so forth. This type of consumption has now fostered a problematic model of the ‘good life’ even in developing countries. Yet instead of a proper acknowledgement of this, we are too often offered (as in Jason Moore’s recent Capitalism in the Web of Life) a hypostatisation of the system, as if capital itself were responsible and acting autonomously. We are told of capitalism’s ‘arrogance’, its ‘desires’, its ‘choices’, and so on – along with a relative abstraction from the everyday life of ordinary people, either in their role as consumers or in their electoral support for the system. Thus the impression is given that only as workers do most human beings figure in the survival and reproduction of capitalism. Moore recognises that what is at stake today is not only class-struggle, but also ‘a contest between contending visions of life and work’. He says little, however, about how we might develop that claim, and offers no insights on any alternative vision.42
Or again (to take up a point, made by Bonneuil and Fressoz), it may be true that ninety corporations are responsible for 63 per cent of the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and methane produced between 1850 and the present day, but it is important to note that these emissions stem from the production of fossil fuels and concrete used in housing, building projects and in innumerable consumer articles throughout those years.43 It is also true, as Andreas Malm says, that we cannot put the blame for Chinese emissions on Chinese workers44, but we do surely have to put some blame on the very ready consumption of the cheap goods they are producing, a readiness shared around the globe and across class lines. We should also acknowledge the indifference on the part of large swathes of the population in affluent nations to the sweatshop conditions in which these goods are often produced, and the resistance of many workers to the imposition of fuel tax, or the curbing of today’s dependency on car travel and cheap flights. As I write, the British Prime Minister is promising to freeze fuel tax – a promise campaigned for by the Sun newspaper and intended primarily to woo ‘hard-working families’. Few among those welcoming the promise, one suspects, will agonise much over the illegal levels of air pollution currently condoned by the government, or over the recent imprisonment of those protesting against fracking, or even over the dire predictions of the IPPC Report on global warming released within days of Prime Minister Theresa May’s address to her Party conference in 2018. In France, meanwhile, in a comparable, if more explosive scenario, President Macron has been forced to withdraw his planned raising of the fuel tax in an attempt to quell the Gilets Jaunes protests it generated.
It is true that the huge inequalities generated by neo-liberal policies in recent years have seriously undermined the social solidarity essential to the successful introduction of environmental taxation on everyday consumer goods.45 But to recognise the negative impact of austerity measures and inequality on the support for higher duties on fuel is one thing. It is another to ignore the extent to which workers as consumers are collusive in the reproduction of the capitalist economy – an issue on which much of the left has so far been extremely evasive. Furthermore, however critical they may be of capitalism in other respects, socialists are still much