The Climate Crisis: South African and global democratic eco-socialist alternatives ed. by Vishwas Satgar (review)

Between 10 and 14 million years ago, the concentration of carbon dioxide CO₂ stabilised at over 400 parts per million (ppm). The world was then then 3 to 6°C warmer than now and the sea level was 25 to 40 metres higher (Tripati et al 2009). In May 2013, the concentration touched 400 for the first time in about three million years. The difference now is that CO₂ concentrations are still rising and at a faster pace than ever before in earth’s geological history. In April this year, it topped 411 ppm and will probably average about 409 ppm for the whole year. That compares with 280 ppm in the pre-industrial atmosphere. The earth’s temperature has meanwhile risen by about 1.3°C above the pre-industrial eighteenth century. Unless this is reversed soon, runaway climate change will follow and much of the world will become uninhabitable for humans.

There is a lag between rising carbon concentrations and rising temperatures so we are now feeling the consequences of yesteryear’s emissions. And those consequences are already dire. At present, there are five categories of tropical cyclone but scientists are now debating the need for ‘category 6’ as more storms come in with wind speeds of over 320 kmh. The 2017 Atlantic hurricanes caused unprecedented damage: Harvey flooded Texas, Irma left several Caribbean islands in ruins, and Maria devastated Dominica and Puerto Rico. Late in the season, Ophelia turned north and east to go where no hurricanes have been before. Its tail lashed Ireland and Britain.

At the other end of the weather spectrum, heat and drought has parched the land. In 2015, California entered the fifth year of its worst drought ever. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the taps were dry for most of the day. In southern Africa, the maize crop wilted, cattle died and food prices soared. In northern KwaZulu-Natal, the taps ran dry in several towns. Over the next three years, Cape Town became the next big city after Sao Paulo to watch the dams dry out.

Whether from flood, drought or heat, whether in Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Cape Town or rural KwaZulu-Natal, it is common cause that the poor suffer first and worst. In the mainstream telling of it, however, whether by the scientists of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the country delegations of both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, the managers and arbiters of climate finance at the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the World Bank and other international finance institutions, poor people – even ‘poor and marginalised’ people – come without class. Rich people, in contrast, are never mentioned. Poverty is a function of the absence of development, never of class relations.

The Climate Crisis is aptly named and Satgar rehearses the urgency of the situation in the opening pages. The heart of the book, however, is about reasserting the primacy of class. It’s not just about who dies first but about naming ‘the climate crisis as a systemic crisis of capitalist accumulation’ (2). Hence, the rich are central to the story. Over 500 years, Satgar argues, capitalism has been joined with imperial domination and the never-ending expansion required by the system is sustained by ecocide – ‘the destruction of conditions that sustain life such as ecosystems, the commons, as well as the destruction of actual human and non-human life forms’ – and is now bringing about the sixth great extinction of species in geological time along with climate change (55).

This is an edited volume with 15 chapters from a diversity of contributors. It is part of the Democratic Marxism series and the sub-title, South African and global democratic eco-socialist alternatives, indicates its distance from ‘the failures of twentieth century socialism’ and the despotic ‘productivism’ of socialist states that were as much tied to economic – and ecocidal – growth as their...