Green Jacobinism

 Adam Tooze has a really interesting review in the LRB organised around Andreas Malm's ideas on the politics of the climate crisis. AT pinpoints the view of the Zetkin Collective that the climate crisis represents a revolutionary moment without a revolutionary subject. Along with AT I am minded to take Malm's invocation of War Communism as a model of political response to climate (in)action more as a theoretical provocation than a real historical analogy. The question Malm raises is what is politically optimal if catastrophe is imminent and there are no clear saviors in sight. Climate change, in this view of the world, is to our moment what fascism was to the early part of the twentieth century.

AT does a lovely job of putting Ecological Leninism in a frame where it can be apprehended as a political option alongside the liberal reformism that is the core tactic of the climate change movement (inspired by its understanding of the success of the non-violent rights movements) or the market adaptation favored by the energy companies and their allies (I don't think these are equivalents, but that is not the topic of the day). I think it is reasonable to take it as given that neo-liberal strategies will not solve the crisis, and the outcome of a climate change rhetoric with no action will be some kind of right-wing populist reaction, which leads AT to pose the following "Malm forces us to face a crucial question: what are the social democratic politics of emergency? If his version of ecological Leninism is to be refused, what is the logic of action in the face of disaster?"

I want to suggest the answer to that question is Jacobinism, The characteristic of Jacobinism that fits the moment is that it posits an idealised subject (the people). It is precisely the mode of politics that happens when an absolutely necessary revolutionary project lacks a revolutionary subject. What holds it together is the interaction of the positive notion of a citizen, as someone who accepts the law or necessity as their own will, with the negative antithesis, the aristocrat who denies they are subject to that law (and so holds privilege). Jacobinism is crisis social democracy, or rather is the form democracy takes when it faces existential threat. When in the summer of 1792 it became obvious that civil society restored to its rights could not find an equilibrium around justice, that created the Jacobin moment, that if such a regime could not be found then it would be made. Jacobinism, because of its incoherence and heterogeneity, can never deliver from its own resources the hoped for goal. What it does is end the revolutionary situation, and create the ground for a new "normal" politics. Just to be clear, that does not require Terror (in fact I would argue that was an incredible mistake),.

The most powerful example of Jacobinism is not French, but American. The Union side in the American Civil War was effectively Jacobin. It claimed to represent the people over and above all constitution and rights, it held together a heterogeneous social alliance, that collapsed very quickly once it had eliminated the threat, the power of Southern slaveholders, but while it existed it instituted a "second founding". Marilynn Robinson's wonderful Gilead sequence of novels paints an insightful picture of what happens to a Jacobin project (Iowa, the shining star of radicalism) when the Jacobin moment passes. The Jacobin moment feels like it reveals a more profound reality, being touched by fire. Of course it does not do that, it merely brackets social and economic questions for a moment, opening space to transform the normative content of all institutions and disarm the opposition. At which point every interest again asserts itself and tries to co-opt that new space.

What will characterize Green Jacobinism will be an expanded idea of who/what is a citizen, in the sense of a subject whose integrity and moral subjecthood has to be acknowledged, beyond the human. And the aristocrats will be those who deny the extension of the political community in that way. This is already beginning to happen as green politics builds a special place for indigenous peoples and their lands. And a Green Jacobin project will share other things with the American experience, including a strong religious content. Richard Powers' novel The Overstory picks up all of these themes and anticipates the tragic vision of this kind of Jacobinism.

This has been the successful logic of action in the face of disaster, much more successful than Leninism. Of course that Jacobin moment may never find its Lincoln or Robespierre, the scattered and heterogeneous forces that accept the need for transformation may not be mobilised, or they may, but find the climate aristocrats too powerful to defeat. Strong analogies do not hold.