The third Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union conference on 13 March was attended by a small delegation of Workers' Climate Action (WCA) activists, including AWL members. It was a good opportunity to assess the current state of the mainstream climate movement, as well as the state of the SWP after the German-Rees split. In both cases the verdict is: in a bad way.
The political level of the event was banal, stale and uninspiring. Jonathan Neale, SWP member and author of the new '1 Million Climate Jobs' pamphlet around which the conference was organised, had no concrete answers for workers displaced by climate change or by the policies of governments on climate change – other than to say, we want a million green jobs. The goal is entirely laudable and in the present economic situation, absolutely prescient. But the presentation in the pamphlet is minimalist, bereft of radical, socialist demands – for example around reducing working hours without loss of pay, or workers' control, or much on alternative production. Instead “people of the world should unite to save the planet”, a populist formulation that combines a nebulous agency with confused goal: it is workers who should unite and it is working-class self-liberation that is the perquisite for universal human and ecological emancipation.
Even more significantly, the campaign singularly fails to link up with the actually existing struggles for jobs. Colin Smith from the SWP spoke from the floor about frantically searching for another occupation like Vestas (there was, naturally, no acknowledgement of Workers' Climate Action's pivotal initiating role in the Vestas struggle). Neale said he could get 50-100,000 outside an occupation as long as the plant was 50 miles from a big city. Shame they delivered nothing with their “day of action” on Vestas in September. Nor was anything done to save the Corus plant on Teesside last month, whose steel could have been used to build wind turbines (this is an opening that WCA missed too, but then we are a much smaller organisation with few resources).
One reason for this is the focus on climate jobs as low carbon jobs, which defines steel workers, miners and other energy workers out of the equation. But it also reflects a crass, negative eco-nihilism, well-expressed at the conference by Fred Leplat from Socialist Resistance: against nuclear, against CCS, against biofuels, against aviation – in fact, back to nature, if only they were serious about it.
The other notable political weakness of the event was the third worldist fetish of “the South” as the leadership of the climate movement. Perhaps the upcoming conference in Bolivia will bring together key class fighters, but no one should rely on the bourgeois regime of Evo Morales for a socialist programme on climate change. A few speakers lauded Venezuela, forgetting that his regime is largely an oil rentier state – and one engaged with all manner of oil development.
The conference was attended by less than 150 people. This was half the numbers at the last year’s conference and the first conference in 2008. The event was originally billed as a teach-in, which could have been useful, but in fact reverted to the standard 'left' conference format: opening plenary with a big platform of union bureaucrats and SWP fellow travellers; a few tawdry workshops; followed by a closing plenary with more union tops, climate campaigners and more follow travellers. Both plenary sessions were chaired by SWPers, and the speakers from the floor were heavily biased toward their people.
In contrast to the youthfulness of much of the climate movement, which was reflected at WCA conference earlier this year, most of the audience was older, probably in their 40s. To be fair this reflects the more general state of the trade union movement, and one of the few positives of the event was that there were a fair number of branch reps present. WCA did a stall, receiving quite a bit of interest, with a number of invitations to speak at union branches. It was gratifying that, unlike last year, everyone we spoke to had already heard of us, presumably because of our work at Vestas.
No doubt the SWP will claim the event suffered from the general backlash against climate activism after Copenhagen and the climate science e-scandal. No doubt some people were doing something more useful politically on the day. But the campaign itself has to face its own limitations. It has no real purchase with the majority of big unions, particularly with those in industries most important to reducing emissions. Nor is it anything like the cross-union rank and file network that is necessary to tackle climate change. For such a movement to emerge, clarity about both underlying ideology and political strategy are required. That implies a very different culture from the stale self-congratulation we witnessed on Saturday, and also a democratic structure within which participants can collaborate, debate and determine the campaign's direction.
For the Workers' Climate Action website see here