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Nicholas Beuret, "Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition" (Verso, 2025)
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Nicholas. Thank you so much for being here to discuss your new book or something. Why we need to Disrupt the Climate Transition I read your book above all as a comradely and generative intervention in the left wing climate strategy debate, which is going to inform the bulk of my questions. But before we dive into the substance of the book, I'd love for you to share a bit about your background both as an activist and a scholar and what ultimately motivated you to write this book. And more specifically, which tensions or challenges within the climate movement were you grappling with as you were writing it?
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Well, thank you for having me. A bit about my own background. Well, I came to academia late. It was sort of, it was a way not to find a point on it of escaping the non governmental industrial complex. In a way I was prior to being an academic I worked for environmental NGOs, I've worked in peak bodies and charities and for for a number of years and before that I was, you know, variously precariously employed as a event manager, graphic designer and general activist. But this is mostly across now three, three continents. It would be Australia where I started. Obviously I have an Australian accent so you can probably tell from Australia, the US and here now. One of the things that got me into academia is it was working for. I used to work with Friends of the Earth in England and England, Wales and Northern Ireland is the organization. And one of the big campaigns I worked on before leaving the NGO was the Campaign to Secure the Climate Change act, which is the world's first piece of climate legislation, which passed in. Have to jog my memory now. 2008, 2009, maybe it's 2009. I can't exactly remember. It's quite some time ago now. That was actually, in some ways one of the first things that got me interested in what the reality of the transition would look like in terms of. And when I left working for Friends of the Earth, I studied a PhD specifically on how you organize against the end of the world, which was the name of the PhD was the title of the PhD at the time. And I was interested in the labor of creating climate policy and legislation or treating that sort of space as a terrain of work. But as time went on, I became more and more interested in what would the reality of a transition economy look like if we fast forward through a few climate movements from climate camp to extinction rebellion. One of the themes that came up again and again and again in my involvement, often very peripheral at this stage, rather than as it had been previously, was there was a real, almost a presumption that anything green, anything that was actually substantively, could be called substantive action on climate change, was necessarily good or actually progressive. In some ways, we reached a peak of that moment, rhetorically and politically, with the concept of the Green New Deal. And prior to the pandemic, which is often still underappreciated as a point of rupture, the Green New Deal really was held up as the ideal of what climate policy would look like. And in some ways, I think there was almost a naive, implicit belief that any real climate policy would look something like that ideal. Starting from my time at Franzier, through know, joining academia and like again, involvement in climate camp, extinction, rebellion, local climate action, I started becoming incredibly suspicious of this narrative. Not only the realistic prospects of something like the Green New Deal without a combative social force, but more to the point that Green was good, that action on climate change was necessarily, in a sense, socialism or even like social democracy in disguise. And I think I kind of. I don't agree with Trump on almost, I think absolutely nothing, except when he called out action on climate change as socialism in disguise. And I think actually, if we're honest, that's what we were talking about. We were talking about climate change as a means of securing socialism that we'd failed to secure in other sort of political avenues. The suspicion that I sort of generated as I was involved in climate politics was that environment movements and much of the left was missing what was actually happening under the name of climate policy. And they were missing an actual transformation of the political economies of not just the global north, but global political economy that was reorganizing work, labor and economic proceeds around key green frontier industries and other sort of key technologies. And that this transformation was, wasn't actually a positive, a net positive for the working classes of the world or the global south, or even consumers from a consumer point of view, but rather it was a new regime of accumulation. And so the book, that was a very long winded introduction. The book is an attempt to start to grapple with this transformed global political economy and to set out some of the points of intervention, considering that this is nothing like the Green New Deal, this is in fact something worse and that we need to take it politically seriously.
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And turning to the book's introduction, in fact to the very first page, you put forward the provocative claim that when it comes to climate action, we are in the midst of a war of transition, yet troublingly one that only one side is fighting. And you go on to describe that while business and government are reshaping the social contract, both the left and the climate movement remain at an impasse with hopes for a revisit, revitalize green social democracy in ruins, while reactionary far right social forces gain ground seemingly everywhere. And in this conjuncture, you argue that much of what passes for climate action is little more than symbolic, with activists either becoming obsessed with the spectacle of dissent, hitting the dead end of policy obsession, or retreating into arcane questions of strategy far removed from the reality of the transition or the actual social forces that can enact such a program. So instead, you argue what is needed is for ecosocialists to, quote, understand the shape of the transition, to map its contours and contradictions as a process that is already underway, so that we can start to organize not against it, but through it. So there's a lot to unpack in this introduction, but I'll begin by asking very simply, what do you mean by the transition economy and how is it so profoundly reshaped the terrain of climate action and politics?
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So with the transition economy, I've sort of. It's been. When you don't have a book to explain things, sometimes it takes, you have to sort of do work towards sound bites. And so I've been explaining the transition economy as really two things. The first, by the transition economy. I really do mean an economy in transition. So I'm trying to refer to a political economy, a global political economy that manifests differently in different locations. Global locations as something in change, in flux, in motion, that's being contested more successfully currently from the right and from big capital rather than the left, environmental movements. But nonetheless, it's an unsettled period of time, an unsettled political economy. Within that period of unsettlement or reconstitution, there is a specific kind of economy emerging. So that's what I call the transition economy proper. Now, in the global north, what we're looking at is a specific kind of state led, I wouldn't want to say industrialization because that comes up a lot in terms of it is full of sound and fury, of tariffs and national investment. There's an assumption that any sort of state led economic processes necessarily hinges on state led industrialization. The transition economy is very much state led in terms of the state has had to step in to ensure profitability and security of investment. But in many ways that's as far as it goes for the transition economy in that sense that there's a continuity with neoliberalism. Even if the transition economy does constitute a different regime to neoliberalism, it's stay led insofar as what's taking place is that the problem of climate change is being used to create new economic opportunities to overcome secular stagnation. A stagnant global economy. Well, we say global, but overwhelmingly the emphasis is on dealing with economic stagnation in the global North. Now there's a few pieces to that sort of new form of climate regulation, and I'm far from the first person to explore it in that sense. But the emphasis is on doing a few things to ensure that businesses can invest securely in an effort to solve climate change nominally, but to restart economic growth. Now, from a macro point of view, we're dealing with sort of strong levels of investment and incentivization, from tax breaks to different forms of regulations or regulatory breaks. We're dealing with also quite novel forms such as guaranteeing profits either through things like the contracts for difference which ensure profitability for renewable energy, or accelerating the deployment of things like green contracts and the establishment of green monopolies for businesses. Again to guarantee future revenue to make investment safe. There's the creation of, I think this is often underappreciated, the wholesale creation of whole new markets to encourage investment. You know, from everything from heat pumps to electric vehicles to new new forms of software and software Products to ensure that when, if a business invests, it's safe to do so because there's a guaranteed revenue stream on top of a number of different financial instruments. And they're like that have been explored elsewhere. I think one of the, again, one of the more understated or underappreciated aspects of this new regime is a broad, an attempt to de risk investment. Now often that means providing financial security or de risking through guaranteed markets or contracts. So things that I talked about previously, but as a part of the transition economy, there's a broad push to reduce the overheads of democracy, we could put it that way. To go after so called NIMBYs, to go after, continue to go after unions, to go after environmental groups, to weaken regulations and regulatory laws. Now often we sort of see these things in contradistinction that there's environmental policies that are necessarily regulation heavy, that constrain action, and then there's anti environmental action. But for the transition itself, where the objective is to essentially be dealing with the private enclosure of climate change as a problem in order to generate growth, it's important to defang the public because democracy and growth, economic growth are in opposition here. So a core part of the transition economy is a renewed assault on any vestige of democracy that remains. And it stands in between investment and development and climate action.
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And staying with the introduction, you argue that the climate movement must confront this green transition, which you described very nicely as a project that continues the naturalization of the market undertaken through neoliberal practices by waging a war of green transition. The reference of course, being in allusion to Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that the Bolsheviks insurrectionary model was ill suited to the consolidated liberal democracies of interwar Western Europe and therefore urged communist parties to pursue not a war of maneuver, but rather one of position. So could you talk us through how do you conceptualize this war of green transition and how does it draw on Gramsci's analysis of the conditions for revolutionary politics in interwar European? And what lessons might contemporary climate activists take from his writing?
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So when I can, like when conceptualizing the Gramsche in field of politics, this is not inherent to all the writings or the work on Gramsci. There's a tendency to sort of, to almost understand it as sort of like a chessboard in terms of, you know, and you can look, you can think about the war of maneuver and the war of position simulating sort of on a stable terrain. I guess what marks out a war of transition differently is that it's the terrain Itself that's in motion, and the actors are needing to find a way to navigate that constantly changing influx, contested terrain, rather than trying to find their way to secure a position within that terrain or to move to occupy greatest portion of it. It's a spatial metaphor, I understand it's not entirely accurate. One of the reasons I want to talk about the war of transition is that we're dealing with, in many ways, with a moving target. We're at the very beginning of the elaboration of a transition economy and the various forms of regulation, policy, law, but also common sense that will populate it. In a war of transition. I would suggest one of the things that marks it out is that almost anything can become immediately political. There's a very short step from everyday experience, a workplace grievance like a local development and community, and a highly developed political understanding of that event. People become immediately political in a war of transition because things are in motion, things are in flux. If we were to skip from Gramsci to Foucault, we keep going back to something like the society must be defended and the idea that we're in a period of civil war where the stakes are immediately apparent and things have yet to be codified or have yet to solidify into a social arrangement. Fighting the war of transition. I think at the moment, if we're going to sort of set out who's successfully finding it, we're finding obviously business and government of a particular ruling class faction organized around sort of green frontier industries, are successfully putting together a program. Not every part of that faction is succeeding. There's obviously going to be winners and losers within the capitalist class, the green capitalist class. And I think it seems to be already clear that hydrogen, those investing in hydrogen, those sorts of businesses are already starting to lose out. But that's a clear protagonist within the story. In opposition to that, I think it's important to name Trump and MAGA on one side and reform in the UK and another as possibly some of the first openly transition parties, and that they're openly contesting the terms of the transition, the very concepts what would constitute common sense. Through this process, they're really staking a claim to be transition actors. In some ways, maybe that sounds paradoxical because they both, as actors, they oppose concepts like net zero and climate action. But they have located their base as protagonists within the war and transition, and particularly, more often than not, those seemingly losing out to green deindustrialization as key actors in terms of the left, or sort of what constitutes left and the environment movement, the Environmental left fighting the war of transition. In that sense, I think it's a similar process to that of the far right in terms of not necessarily identifying things like true climate action or what's a false solution of who's the corporation that's benefiting from this, or not treating it as though it's a black or white policy question, which tends to happen a lot within environmental thinking or as a question of real action or false action or carbon accounting. This again, we just need to count parts per million and somehow we'll get to where we're going. But to realize there are multiple forms of action on climate change and transformations of our economy that can have profoundly negative impacts on the global majority, the working classes in the global north, et cetera. It's also crucial, though. This is why I want to emphasize we need to interrogate the constitution of the transition economy to locate actors within the current reconfiguration that have something at stake, something to lose, something to gain some way of exerting leverage within the transition itself. Now, one of the things I think is interesting, and it was noted by James Medway in an article for the Morning Star in the UK recently, is that he noticed a difference in how the Green Party, now reconstituted as an eco populist party, talked about the working class in the uk. And it another thing, it's an interesting one because it does speak to the kind of economy that the transition economy is. He said that Hannah Spencer, the the new MP for Gordon and Denton, talked about hairdressers and plumbers and other tradespeople and he was really in nurses, all of which would be in, I guess, in a broader scheme of things. And an older sort of class schema would have been. Would be Canada's petty bourgeois, whereas labor would traditionally try to talk up, you know, traditional working class occupations. So this is probably less so. Like post Blair, they would have still talked about Mondeo man, they still would have talked about treaties and the rest of it. But Medway was identifying that actually a core part of the new working class does or can appear as though it is petty bourgeois small contractors. A hairdresser often rents their chair. They don't own a hairdresser salon. A plumber can be a contractor, a sole trader can work for a small business or run one at various times. They really identified, or Medway really pointed out that the Greens had identified a change in the working class and that this is something that you could still, rather than seeing this as an antagonism in a classical sort of Marxist sense between the petty bourgeois and the proletariat needing to understand there's been a recomposition of the proletariat itself, possibly along lines that mirror or mimic things that we would have previously called the petty bourgeois.
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Are you a player in the private equity industry? Troutman Pepper Lock is one of the leading national law firms focusing on middle market private equity. Our podcast, PE Pathways, brings on dealmakers to share their thoughts on trends and developments. We do a deep dive into the M and A industry with topics around tax, employment issues, regulatory developments, and much more. Check out PE Pathways wherever you get your podcast. And I have several questions for you about sort of identifying agents capable of waging that war of transition and the class composition as well of climate politics. But before we get there, and turning now to the first chapter, one way in which this manifests itself, this new terrain of struggle, is through what you call the squeeze, which you argue is, quote, transforming the grounds of the everyday and our ability to act on the world and shape the future. So for our listeners, many of whom are likely tuning in while carrying out some of the everyday tasks of social reproduction for themselves or their families, this is going to be a very relatable concept. But what may be less obvious to them is that the squeeze is a shared collective social condition, which you argue is precisely the problem that that's not identified as such. So could you walk us through exactly what the squeeze is and why it is so central to your understanding of contemporary climate politics?
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One of the things that I find frustrating around climate communications, it's kind of like that's what when people want to talk about the impacts of climate change, they tend to now call it a field of climate communications. It's almost heavily professionalized. It's as professionalized as the creation of climate policy or anything else. There's a tendency to talk about dramatic events. It could be the Atlantic Meridian overturning circus sort of shutting down. It can be floods in Mozambique, it could be fires in Australia or Los Angeles burning or something like they're big events, really big events, like a hurricane, all that sort of stuff. It's often. And one of the things that that does is that it means that people can sort of make a there's a distance between people's lived experience and climate change, because climate change is something that is big and dramatic and it happens somewhere else more often than not. And one of the changes over the recent years has been while people there's still a high percentage of people in most countries believe in the reality of climate Change. And in most ways that argument's won. Now we're starting to see in quite a few countries, fewer people think that it's going to have a dramatic impact on their daily life. Lots of people think it probably does have some sort of impact on them, but it's not. They sort of see it as an event that arrives from elsewhere occasionally, maybe you'll hit them, but it's more likely to impact somebody else. Most people don't connect the increase in food prices that little bit more. They're paying for almost everything to climate change. Now, everybody, if you ask someone about the cost of living, everybody knows about it from the stories of having to go without things changing products, eating a little bit less of red meat and going for the cheaper bit of turkey or chicken or whatever. That's very, very clear to people paying more for your energy bills daily, little inconveniences, it's very, very clear. But the connection between that and the climate, the impacts of climate change is a vast gulf. So what I was trying to capture with the concept of the squeeze was to sort of bridge that gap, to talk about how when, if you go shopping and you find you can't afford as much as you used to, that's because of climate change, your energy bills could be from a coal fired power station. If there's an increase, in part it's because of energy bills, shortages in sand, in glass, in paying more for little things like all of it, for services, for insurance, all of it is climate related. The cost of living crisis is a climate crisis. Now I think that's important because that does constitute an almost unseen common condition for all of the working classes. It's across the board and in many ways, when people sort of put the cost of living crisis or opinions around the cost of living crisis and opinions, public opinions around environmental problems or climate change in opposition, I see that as a false opposition. If you're concerned about the cost of living crisis, you're concerned about climate change. Politically, that's obviously going to be absolutely critical. Every time you and I do later on in the book, talk about, not facetiously, quite seriously, talk about shoplifting as a form of climate activism. But the squeeze, I wanted to sort of, I think it's worth nailing down what that constitutes. So the squeeze is a two part, both experience of climate change, but also a political atmosphere. Now, we talked a little bit about the rising costs and that does constitute half of the squeeze. Climate change squeezes our incomes. It makes us feel poorer, it makes us feel like we have less that we can access fewer things. It reduces us like our disposable income generally. It makes for a meaner, smaller life. It also has a knock on effect in terms of while we're facing those costs as consumers, governments and businesses also face those costs. Just as we're getting poorer, local governments often who deliver those services that we could constitute as a kind of social wage are also getting poorer. So we can't afford as much. But then the government cuts, the local government cuts back on programs. Maybe it closes a library, maybe school services. There's a fewer after school clubs across the board. Climate change reduces what we have access to. The second part again is like climate change. We think of disasters like flooding that shuts down little businesses and destroys people's lives. But as crucial all the minor mundane disruptions of everyday life. It could be potholes. It seems like a very, like a ridiculous thing to talk about, sort of. I'm here in England, it's obviously rainy, but we have almost an epidemic of potholes that cost the average driver most. We're talking about two thirds of the, the public, about 4, 500 pounds a year. It's 650 million pounds a year. Local governments spend one and a half billion pounds a year, which is up a third just from a few years ago. So again, those sort of minor disruptions, like, you know, sort of your car hits a pothole, you have to, you miss the start of work, or your kid doesn't get to school on time, or like you get stuck out and traffic and you have to arrange for a second car, you have to hire that car. Everything gets delayed, everything gets broken down. The mechanics are overworked because there's so many people broken down that it takes you two weeks to get your car back. Now, of course there's a cost, a financial cost to that, but there's also just the actual disruption of your daily life that makes it difficult to settle into things, to rely on things. It could be a mistrain, it could be a closed store, it could be an unexpected delay. It's the combination of those two things at a daily level that act to sort of contract the space of our lives. And not only do they make us poorer, makes us more precarious, less certain. They sort of reduce what we think we can do in terms of what we can imagine that could be different or that could happen. And they reduce the space and time we have to actually do anything about it either. It could be something as simple as looking for. And this is something like a, like one in every three adults living in the UK now has a second job or a side hustle. Could be as something as mundane as like doing a little bit of extra work to get some money to, to get the things you used to be able to afford, or being involved in politics, taking time out after work to go and do something or take action or protest a genocide in Palestine or oppose the local data center or campaign to get sewage at a river or, or get one of the local Green MPs elected or something like that.
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And you also explain how the squeeze extends into our capacity to imagine and hope for political alternatives. In your own words, the climate squeeze is very much a contraction of the promise of the future. And worryingly, you write, the futures that our present political moment let us imagine are contracting and becoming meaner. What does it mean to understand hope itself as a terrain of political contestation?
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Here I'm really referencing a Lebanese Australian sort of anthropologist, political philosopher, Ghassan Haj. And he wrote a fantastic book in the early 2000s called paranoid nationalism. And his contention, he's a Lacanian theorist, his contention was that we should understand hope as part of the psychic symbolic economy of neoliberalism. And what neoliberalism did was to make hope scarce. And that was part of his analysis of underpinning the rise of a kind of a right wing xenophobic nationalism in Australia. Now I think that's still a very pertinent analysis. The idea that hope is a thing in many ways, is a material thing as a border. I'm not a Lacanian, I'm very much in the materialist school of thought. But it's a thing that has both a character and is subject to some of the kinds of constraints of a political economic arrangement. Now, where hope, say under neoliberalism, took a particular form, a form of aspiration, I think at the moment we're seeing quite clearly the breakdown of that kind of hope, the breakdown of aspiration. While that's breaking down. And I think post 2008 financial crisis that's been a slow moving collapse of aspiration, whereas you'd find it almost impossible if you survey anyone under the age of 25 today for them to take seriously the idea of having aspiration, which as a side quest constitutes a real crisis for capitalism. The idea of the ability to command labor breaks down when people don't aspire to excel at work or think work is a vehicle for. For anything other than the bare minimum of a paycheck. While that's breaking down, in theory, coming back to this concept of flux that should open up the space for counter hopes, for other kinds of dreams and other imaginaries and other imaginations, there should be a way of making hope immediately political. And I think we do see glimpses of that. But hope has a material ground. And if you can't, if you're exhausted at the end every, every single day, you can't, if week after week everything you can buy less and less, if you've got less and less time, if you've never got an uninterrupted moment to sort of secure your footing, to think about what the future could be, the actual space, the material space for like, for articulating another kind of hope or engaging in hopeful projection, it contracts. So just as aspirations obviously breaking down as a form of hope, just as we need to hope for something different and better, the material grounds for it contract, making it very difficult to imagine life in six months, let alone life in six years.
- [32:42]
A
And in the turning now to the second chapter, your focus shifts back to the political economy of the Green transition. While the transition economy is often touted as a means of creating green manufacturing jobs, which is a central claim of the Biden administration's build back better agenda, for example, you argue that the green jobs boom is not enabling a renaissance of labor organizing, but rather a deepening of neoliberal trends structurally. This is because within green capitalism assemblage and installation has art largely displaced traditional manufacturing as the most labor intensive sectors of the economy. Beyond these structural dynamics, you warn that the resulting sense of betrayal risks becoming the dominant political emotion of the Green transition, one all too easily mobilized by an emboldened far right. So my question is why has the promised green manufacturing boom remained so elusive? And what are the social and political implications of a green transition that increasingly takes the form of a precarious low wage installation economy?
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B
So in this part of the book, this part of the analysis, I'm. I'm coming back to that sort of, that sort of the very Brenner Ben of debate around overcapacity, industrial overcapacity. If one of the reasons for the turn to a transition economy, for the state to lead, to try to lead investment and to de risk investment and to really sort of push capital to turn to these green frontier industries into new forms of organization and production that are extensively climate friendly. So beneath the hood, beneath the policy hood, is really the persistent problem of the decline of manufacturing. And it's crucial, I would argue, to understand the decline of manufacturing global north as a consequence. And here I agree with Ben and Evan and Brenner. As a consequence of Kaplan's own sort of incredible revolutionization of production, actually manufacturing productivity is absolutely not only outstrips the capacity to consume manufacturing products. Now, that's not just the case, I would suggest at a national level where, but again, following Brenner's core argument, that the world has successively increased manufacturing capacity in a series of displacements. And I think Beverly Silver's work on the forces of production is quite crucial. And every time capital sort of tried to flee excess environmental regulation and workers struggles, that's ended up reconstituting the working class, industrial working class, and unionization and strike activity in other parts of the world. Each successive wave of the globalization of manufacturing has created ever more excess manufacturing capacity at a global level. And at this point, at least within traditional manufacturing, we're sitting at such a huge level of excess that there are few parts of the world where a good minority of manufacturing capacity in any given sector, from steel to cars, just can't be used profitably. One of the things that I argue is that the same problems that beset manufacturing in terms of international competition and excess capacity, excess capacity for capital, not for us, but for capital, besets any other form of manufacturing, including green manufacturing. In fact, already seeing excess capacity in a whole series of green industries around the world, and even in the world's workshop in China, we're seeing deindustrialization in some parts of the north, creation of rust belts and opiate addiction and social dislocation, while new green industries form in the South. Now, a big part of the reason I contend that manufacturing is not returning is because the investment in green manufacturing won't solve the fundamental problem of overcapacity. There is a secondary aspect to it, though, and the secondary aspect is most, not all, but most green industries. Green manufacturing and green industries are actually simpler processes that require fewer workers because we're often dealing with simpler products like fossil fuels. And fossil fuel processes are actually often a lot more complicated than simplified ones using just direct electricity. At the same time, any new manufacturing investment or new industry investment often comes with some of the most sophisticated manufacturing processes. So highly automated, roboticized, we're at the point. Whereas if you want to build electric vehicles, you can just run an entirely, a dark factory entirely, where your workforce constitutes maybe five guys with master's degrees in engineering and not 2,000 workers on a production line. The combination of automation, robotics, simple processes, and continued global overcapacity means that there's just no structural way for the green transition to revive manufacturing at a global level.
- [38:07]
A
And in this second chapter you also make the provocative claim that the transition economy, which is facilitated by the creation of secure investment channels for capital, what Daniela Gabor has termed the Wall street consensus in is generating a new category of green jobs, just not the ones that maybe we were expecting, which includes border guards, mercenaries and other types of security operatives. In what sense would you classify these as green jobs? And how central is or could become this militarized form of securitization to the transition economy?
- [38:46]
B
I didn't have it in mind, but I probably should have had Elysium, the film in mind when I was writing, was writing up the work on sort of the various kinds of work in the green economy. And sort of the emblematic figure is the installation worker. This is someone who works for a small business or is a sole trader. It comes all the way back to the beginning around who the figures in the Hannah Spencer from the Greens were talking to. The installation worker works for a small business or runs a small business and it literally installs components made somewhere else. And that sort of installation work is we're finding that in lots of work counts as industry or manufacturing in the US or Europe at the moment is actually just installation work. It's assembling components made elsewhere at the final stage to get that made in Europe or made in US sticker at the end. Lots of construction increasingly resembles installation work, which brings together prefabbed parts. And increasingly everything from graphic design to software engineering also is bolting together parts made somewhere else. So the installation worker who might work in a small business with precarious margins is like lots of is a dispersed workforce that's hard to organize. That's the very much the emblematic figure. It's definitely not the only one though. Waste management is another fantastic job that people can look forward to doing as an intensified part of the green transition. But I also do talk about guard work. One of the reasons I put the border guard, the security guard, prison guard, you know, military operative, the paramilitary operative in as green workers is that as I said right at the beginning, there is no transition economy that's not de risked. And the biggest risk is us in a nutshell. And I don't just mean at a mine site where you could maybe you pay off a militia, Rwandan backed militia in DRC to make sure you get your cobalt across the border so you can make your batteries. Or as a prison guard ensuring that the workers who are manufacturing wind turbines or solar panels are doing their job. So in a sense, you need people to. They're sort of classic examples of how prison guards and security guards can intersect with the green economy through various forms of extraction or coerced labor. But all forms of de risking are critical. So the security guards standing in between a local community and the solar park, the solar farm that's being developed, they're green workers. They're ensuring the construction of green infrastructure. The police cracking down on a protest against carbon trading, or battening environmental protesters calling for a different kind of transition. They're very much essential to the project of the transition itself. Going to war for lithium, helping to initiate a coup in the global south to make sure that we get adequate resources in Western Sahara, like fossil phosphates are actually a crucial part of the green transition. So the Moroccan government's army constitutes a green labor force in that instance. It really does mean oppressing us in an absolutely crucial sense. The border gun is an interesting example in terms of one of the products, the unintended products of the transition economy. Because the transition economy is also a transition into a hotter climate, because it won't stop climate change below 3 degrees. One of the products, unofficial products, are displaced. People managing the outlets of this system are absolutely vital and critical to its functioning. So the border guard is in environmental work in that instance. In another way, describing lots of these kinds of guard labors as green jobs was meant as a provocation to remember that not everything done under the guise of a green job is a good job. Then not all greenwork is work that we'd want to be seen to be done.
- [43:00]
A
And in the, in the second half of the book, then your focus shifts back to the climate movement itself. While these chapters are not overtly polemical, you articulate a very clear position within the ecosocialist debate on climate strategy. For instance, in chapter four, you argue that, quote, if the environmental movement is to become a genuine threat to fossil capitalism, and if we are to have any hope of staying below profoundly dangerous levels of climate change, we need to build the movement's disruptive capacity. The way to do this is not through any one demographic or tactic, but by constructing a machine capable of creating the ecological militancy and cadre we need to sustain, sustain disruption. That machine is the blockade. And you go on to highlight the numerous achievements and victories associated with the global mt anti extractivist movement and the tactics of blockadia, to borrow a term from Naomi Klein. And you provide several concrete examples, including a blockade of oil refineries organized by disgruntled British farmers in Cheshire in 2000. But writing about this incident, you note that as the blockade spread, panic buying and rationing ensued. And 24 hours later around 3,000 service stations closed for lack of of fuel. Food and service in supermarkets begin to be rationed and hospitals canceled non essential operations. So what follows isn't an easy question, but it's an important one for us to grapple with. Because if this is the immediate outcome of the blockade, what hope is there of keeping the public on our side long enough to sustain such actions? And how do you prevent the backlash from metastasizing into a reactionary anti ecological politics?
- [44:50]
B
I think it's important to, for at least for the environmental movement is to not, not assume that any one movement has to do everything. So I think one of the lessons of the recent populist lessons we could have learned is that not every actor needs to do the same job. And so in that one of the reasons I sort of approach, I have a tripod approach in the book, but I don't think of it as exhaustive in any sense, but is that I think there is a specific job the environment movement needs to do. And if we go back through some of the lessons of the movement in the 80s and the 90s, it didn't necessarily have to get everybody on site. I think one of the lessons from say in the book, there's at least two in Britain that I use, which is the anti roads movement and the anti genetically Modified organisms movement. Them both highly destructive, really focused, incredibly combative in both instances. They did have broad public support for the aims of both movements, but not necessarily for the tactics or the strategies or the objectives. Sorry, tactics or strategies as they were founded on the ground in terms of displacement or disruption. The same goes for in Australia where I'm from. Lots of forest blockading is incredibly disruptive to people's lives and livelihoods and there's generally broad support for protecting forests. But no one actually likes forest blockaders. They're generally like not well regarded people any more than there was a recent blockade of a coal port in Australia. Again, the public generally condemns blockading for the environment movement. I think there's, that there's, there was a tendency to think the changes that were the changes to policy into investment into production that are required to stop climate change could be done just by shifting public opinion. The idea was to take public opinion as a target and to try to move it, thinking that that would then provide the leverage on government and capital. And that's very much not the case, I think if anything, we've seen an increasing disconnect between public opinion and governance, whereas the government's, unless they're absolutely forced to, just do not care what people think. So I don't think public opinion is a useful target to build power. Now, it is true that disrupting things like oil refineries or blockading new construction or opposing developments is going to put people offside. And there is a necessary level of public support for an environment movement to function. I think we underestimate how well supported action the environment is, even when people disagree with specific actions that might inconvenience them. That said, the environment movement does, if it like if we do want to stop climate change below, say three degrees, below two and a half degrees, or even possibly two degrees, it will necessarily put some people offside. And that's why I would say the environment movement is but one component of a broader movement. But that said, it doesn't have to do the job of all the rest of the movement. Its job is to be disruptive. In some ways, actually being disruptive might change the narrative. It might open up space for other conversations. It might find unlikely allies. And again, I think back to Australia. A recent, relatively recent campaign was around stopping fracking. And the alliance was between farmers and environmental activists, two groups you think would be at loggerheads. But farmers ended up becoming incredibly politicized and militant in the campaign. And the campaign became known as Lock the gate. So lock the farm gate to stop fracking companies coming into agricultural land to frack farmers had an economic interest in fracking. There was money to be made in it. But an alliance was formed through good, classic community campaigning, but also making the argument without giving up on disruptive actions. I think that's possible, and possibly more possible than we give credit for.
- [49:01]
A
And then in chapter five, you describe how the squeeze is enforced through prices, and this turns then the market itself into a site of. Of climate struggle. And then you examine a tactic for implementing price controls from below, which you've already mentioned, shoplifting. You highlight statistics indicating that this petty act of resistance is becoming increasingly widespread in both the UK and the us and you also provide examples of how it can be harnessed into a collective act of social resistance, such as the mass proletarian shopping actions carried out by Italian economistas in the 1970s. But perhaps the more salient historical example that you provide is probably the anti poll tax campaign in the uk, which created a crisis of legitimacy for Thatcher's government in the early 1990s. So could you explain how did the anti poll tax campaign develop into an organized act of refusal capable of challenging Thatcher's government? What lessons might contemporary climate activists draw from this experience? And then also can a war of attrition, as you describe this, deliver the rapid, deep, immediate changes to all aspects of society that the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change says are necessary to address global warming? Or are they tactics that are maybe better suited purely to anti austerity campaigns?
- [50:32]
B
I think one of the most salient lessons from the poll tax movement, and there was as many, is that was the form of organization. And I think that we find echoes of it in terms of renters unions, because the form that they took were community unions to use, not to stretch the concept of the union, but to really sort of bring it back to maybe some of its more historical roots. The idea of the union being these ward or region or neighborhood based groups that whose function was to bring people together on a particular kind of terrain. So this, the terrain was focused on resisting the imposition of attacks. And then that imposition involved everything from community defense against bailiffs, to court support, to strategizing how to run a campaign of refusal. And those unions were then networked. So it would maybe it's council community communism. I'm not entirely sure at this point what we want to call it, but it really was a networking of community based unions that took non payment as the train of their strike. Because, you know, the poll tax rebellion was a, was a series of payment strikes. That's not that different to how renters unions look to organize themselves. We can extend that into other parts of the marketplace. Now I don't really think it's useful to make it too to flatten the differences between a workplace union and a community union too much. But at the same time, there is quite a lot of leverage to be found in the marketplace in the same way as you find in say a public sector union. And the reason I draw that comparison is that when a public sector union goes on strike working for the government, the government saves money. A service doesn't get delivered, but that service that gets delivered is to the community, not to the government itself necessarily. Say you work in library services, library workers go on strike, it's the community that suffers because the community is the point of production, not the government itself. But you know, you have to find ways of making your strike disruptive to government. The same with the point of consumption. If you refused, you can't refuse to consume. That's not going to work. You can't refuse to buy food, you have to find another way to be disruptive. It doesn't lessen the necessity of collective organization, but you should still think of your action as disrupting your antagonist now collectively, E.P. thompson would talk about in the 19th century, sort of people en masse demanding bakers reduce the price of bread, instituting a fair community price. That's very much what I have in mind in terms of how you could institutionalize not shoplifting, but price reductions at a community level, and how you could apply some of the lessons of the poll tax to those sorts of efforts. Because the poll tax unions also intervened into court cases. They put together lists, they resisted bailiffs, again would be quite pertinent if you're dealing with purchases. We could turn consumption into a train of organized contestation. And there's no reason not to extend the union or if you prefer, the party, to community organizing.
- [54:05]
A
And then finally, in chapter six, you explore how work can become a critical terrain of struggle in the war of transition. And for the benefit of listeners, and because there can be no subtweeting on the left, it's helpful maybe to be explicit about whose ideas you're contesting here. Because in my reading at least, this chapter offers a pointed critique of Matt Huber strategy, for example, as outlined in his book Climate Change as Class War of organizing rank and file electricians to disrupt the transition economy from within. Against this you argue that while some on the left hope to find a single workforce that can leverage its power against the whole transition, an Archimedean point against capital, the reality is that, quote, not only is there no single place to focus our organizing efforts or political hopes, but work itself has shed much of its promise of class unity. Now, you do agree that, quote, unlocking the potential held within existing workplace organizations will enable a wider ecosocialist movement to flourish. However, you contend that workplace organizing in the transition economy cannot be focused on workplace issues alone, but must instead adopt a whole worker approach, seeing workers not merely as employees with narrowly defined workplace concerns, but as individuals embedded in communities facing challenges that extend beyond wages and working conditions. So my question would be, why do you consider the whole worker approach in community organizing strategies to be so essential to an ecosocialist political strategy? And is there some concern that many of the examples that you cite in the chapter, even some of the more successful ones, like the GKN factory in Florence, have unfortunately not really succeeded in in their ultimate aims?
- [56:03]
B
One of the reasons to, in a sense to shift focus in terms of workplace organizing is because most of the time. And this is a very broad brush stroke. Most of the time what we're dealing with will be very, for lack of a better word, very defensive struggles, better terms and conditions retained, employment retained and retain, market positioning to go on the offense to actually then use work rather than sort of just try to protect the jobs that we have, but to actually change work itself, to change what's produced, because a different transition will require different outputs. It's not that we want everybody to have a manufacturing job, we quite possibly want everyone to work less and work closer to home and do something that's socially and personally meaningful and fulfilling. We're not going to get to that endpoint purely defending the jobs that we have. And one of the. I start the book with Port Talbot, a steel mill in Wales. One of the problems that we have with the transition is that the unions that we still have and unions and now cover a minority of workers tend to fight to defend whatever jobs exist. And the United Union, one of the largest unions in the uk, recently had a demonstration in support of defense workers. This is in the midst of a very public backlash against the UK support for Israel. And if we get stuck in a defensive approach to work, defending what we have, not only will we not contest the transition and what the transition is, more often than not, we're like, we'll at best hold some of our ground, but probably lose more over time. Moving to a sort of a whole worker approach or a whole community approach enables us to treat work not as a space, a site of defensive struggles, but actually somewhere where we can start to articulate a different world, to restore some of the communist promise, the communist horizon of work, their work, and actually can be a site of liberation and transformation. Why I would suggest that we go back to the broader context of most people's working lives is that there is a more generalized crisis of meaning of work underway that sometimes we want to forget that post 70s, that this has only ever been articulated in louder and louder voices, that lots of people find work meaningless, they find it shit, they want to do less of it. They actually just want to quit if they're possible. There's actually a rejection of work and the identity of a worker. We shouldn't shy away from this and pretend it doesn't matter. Actually, what we do does matter. And it's possible to do two things at once, to both address ecological destruction and the climate impacts of work and to try to articulate something meaningful. If we start not from what workplaces do we have that we want to defend, but start from communities and ask what do the communities need? And how does work address those needs? And so by turning to whole work and whole community organizing, instead of defending scattered workplaces across an economic terrain, we can bring those workers together with the broader communities and ask what work do we need done? Now that does lead to, and this is a lacun in the book, I don't talk about electrolysis or the seasoned state or local or much more than the local government trained on it. But I do argue that the first step is that we do need to start thinking about taking over local municipalities and regions, taking over local government, in a sense occupying every single position of power that we could possibly find and in an organized fashion as a movement. Now in conversations since I published the book, it's come up more than once. Why don't I just go straight to the top of this? Why not go straight to the state? And my argument is unless we build out our capacity and our power and start to realize this vision of a community led transition at a local level first, we'll never have the leverage or power we'll never we need. Should we take government to actually enact any of the policies that we need, like sort of populist governments and left wing governments never get anywhere without a mass base at the moment, if we're honest. Like we don't have the environment movement we need, we don't have the commuting movements we need around price controls and we don't have the actual community slash worker coalitions and organizations, party forms, unions that we need. We don't have any of the pieces yet. And so focusing on transforming work, building out new kinds of workplaces, new industries, new businesses, new public services at a local level that we control will enable us to build the power we need to contest the transition at a more national and regional scale.
- [61:16]
A
Well, there's still so many questions that I could ask you, Nicholas, but I'm going to have to cut us off here. I hope that this conversation will be an invitation for listeners to pick up a copy of your excellent new book out now through Verso Books. Thank you.
- [61:33]
B
Thank you very much.