Climate justice, yes! Reparations, no!

Submitted by AWL on 14 December, 2021 - 4:57 Author: Paul Vernadsky
Climate march

The demand for “climate justice” is one of the great rallying cries for climate activists in recent mobilisations. Global inequalities have to be tackled as part of the fight to prevent dangerous climate change.

Climate campaigners rightly argue that the transition to a net-zero carbon economy must be just. Those in the greatest need should get the resources they require when they need them — which is now. Those with the greatest ability to pay should supply the resources, ideally for free.

Transfers from the richest to the poorest are necessary to tackle structural inequalities. The rich must cover the cost of carbon drawdown technologies which benefit the whole world but yield no income. Temperate countries, mostly richer, must welcome “climate refugees” from hotter and low-lying countries, mostly poorer. These arguments are widely articulated and consistent with Marxist principles.

At COP26, many demonstrators rallied behind banners calling for “climate reparations”. Most did so on the understandable grounds of climate justice and for solidarity with the “Global South”. However, putting the demands in a “climate reparations” frame is problematic on multiple levels.

Marxists have historically opposed demands for reparations. For example, during World War 1, a chief demand of the Marxist left was “peace without annexations and indemnities”, “Indemnities” meaning the same as reparations.

Our comrades argued that as a general principle, and in advance, not as a particular response to the demands made on Germany by France, Britain, and the USA after the war. They argued not because they dismissed the damage likely to be done, or done, in the war — Serbia, attacked by Austro-Hungary, had over half its male population killed — but because they believed that the only way to construct a world of peace and equality was to unite the working class across borders to level up for the future. To focus on country vs. country demands for redressing past damage could only divide workers by diverting us into endless national claim and counter-claim.

To demand the richest states bear the bulk of the cost of emission-reducing technological change, of carbon drawdown, and of measures of adaptation to the climate change which already locked in, is right. To frame that as “reparations” would:

• Frame the causes of climate change falsely

• Downgrade class analysis in favour of states and “camps”, “good peoples” and “bad peoples”

• Weaken the basic case for redistribution of resources

• Divide rather than unite, and lead workers into nationalist snares

• Fail to mobilise the forces necessary to combat climate change.

The case for “climate reparations”

The case for reparations was recently made by George Monbiot, “Never mind aid, never mind loans: what poor nations are owed is reparations”, The Guardian, (5 November 2021).

Monbiot stated:

“The story of the past 500 years can be crudely summarised as follows. A handful of European nations, which had mastered both the art of violence and advanced seafaring technology, used these faculties to invade other territories and seize their land, labour and resources…

“The stolen labour, land and goods were used by some European nations to stoke their industrial revolutions… Unwittingly at first, then with the full knowledge of the perpetrators, the industrial revolutions released waste products into the Earth’s systems…

“Some of the pollutants were both invisible and global. Among them was carbon dioxide, which did not disperse but accumulated in the atmosphere. Partly because most rich nations are temperate, and partly because of extreme poverty in the former colonies caused by centuries of looting, the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are felt most by those who have benefited least from their production…”

“Never mind aid, never mind loans; what the rich nations owe the poor is reparations.”

The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) report, Climate Repairs: Making Reparation for a History of Colonialism and Enslavement (October 2021), also makes a case for climate reparations. It states:

“We propose a practical implementation of climate justice in the form of global solidarity based on the idea of climate reparations… We are clear that the wealthy countries that are responsible for the majority of historic emissions have a duty to finance the sustainability transition for the countries of the Global South.

“Western countries that have benefited from exploitation and extraction of natural resources, people and land from Global South countries should acknowledge the harm caused and compensate them. These countries that are currently experiencing the worst effects of the climate crisis deserve climate justice. The UK has a special responsibility to the world for historic emissions that are causing loss and damage across the Global South and a duty to make reparation for our shameful past of colonialism and enslavement.”

These arguments were first articulated in Maxine Burkett, “Climate Reparations”, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 10 (2009). She put the case in the context of wider reparations demands:

“The reparations ethos is based on international and general law principles that require perpetrators to return wronged individuals to the status quo ante or, if not possible, compensate victims for their injuries... Reparation, broadly defined, describes programmes that are justified by past harms and are also designed to assess and correct the harm and improve the lives of the victims into the future. This definition incorporates the backward- and forward-looking nature of reparations claims.”

Burkett argued:

“Climate reparations is the effort to assess the harm caused by the past emissions of the major polluters and to improve the lives of the climate vulnerable through direct programmes, policies and/or mechanisms for significant resource transfers, to assure the ability of the climate vulnerable to contemplate a better livelihood in light of future climate challenges. In order to repair individual communities as well as the global community, all those engaged in the reparative effort will have to squarely confront the deep moral questions posed by both the initiating harm — excess emissions — and the continuing harm: the failure to adequately include the plight of the climate vulnerable in the current processes developed to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.”

False framing

These authors share a righteous humanitarian instinct. Analytically, though, they bypass investigation of the dominant political economy of the past two centuries, the capitalist mode of production, in favour of telling a story of some bad peoples doing down other, helpless, peoples. Steeped in post-colonial discourse, legal “rights”, and straightforward moralising, they ignore classes and class struggle, lump exploiters and exploited together, and substitute guilt-tripping for serious climate politics.

Marxists make a very strong case for capitalism as the cause of climate change. Capitalism — with its exploitation of waged labour by capital, its competitive drive to accumulate, its insatiable pursuit of profits over human needs and ecological limits — is the system that has given rise to the climate crisis. Capitalist states — mired in rivalry, riven by inequalities of power and resources, their governments captive of business and subservient to corporate interests — fail to cooperate or find even the most minimal agreement to turn the tide of greenhouse gas emissions and put humanity on the path to a sustainable future.

Instead, advocates of climate reparations employ catch-all categories of “global North” and “global South”, “Western countries” and “wealthy countries”, to paint a picture of collective responsibility that is divisive, nationalist and ultimately politically reactionary.

US academics Olúfémi O Táíwò and Beba Cibralic, in “The Case for Climate Reparations”, Foreign Policy (October 2020), interpret all climate injustice as “climate colonialism” and “climate apartheid”. This gives an alibi to today’s capitalism by attributing its injustices to particular forms largely in the past (West European colonial empires ended in 1975, apartheid was 1948-94). It diverts from anti-capitalist effort by looking to re-run the old fights against colonialism and against apartheid, in somewhat the same way that bourgeois nationalists in South American countries politically independent since the early 19th century have proposed “Second Independence” to divert workers from anti-capitalism.

Advocates of reparations conflate what needs to be distinguished. Past burning of fossil fuels and the resulting carbon emissions started with early nineteenth century British capitalists, but extended to capitalists in Europe, North America and other parts of the world by the late twentieth century. The agents who decided to emit greenhouse gases and who began the process are now long dead, even if some of the firms they built still exist.

More importantly, these agents were capitalists, who made their decisions in competition with other capitalists and with the support or connivance of capitalist states. They did not seek or receive permission from the workers they exploited for fossil fuel production, whose labour they replaced with machines, or whose labour process they transformed — to the detriment of workers’ health and safety.

Therefore to make all those living in advanced industrial states responsible for past emissions is to target exploited workers who have had no part in the decisions and have been the immediate victims as today’s stand-in for the long-dead capitalist perpetrators of previous eras. This is not righting an historic wrong, but creating an historic myth that doesn’t stand up. It is certainly not justice.

Further, climate reparations push responsibility back into the past when the damage caused by greenhouse gases was not well established. Nineteenth and twentieth century capitalists were responsible for heinous crimes against the working class. The imperialist states that colonised vast parts of the world perpetrated oppression and exploitation on a gargantuan scale. They certainly knew they were profiting from misery. To think they knew they were creating climate change and still persisted is to collapse analysis into conspiracy theory. The climate change hypothesis was articulated by Svante Arrhenius in the late nineteenth century. Much of the evidence was collected from the 1950s. Even in the 1970s, respected climate scientists like Steven Schneider were unconvinced by global warming. The global public case for climate change was established by James Hansen in 1988, leading to the UNFCCC and the COP process.

Who gets let off the hook

The North/South dichotomy is mostly an updated version of the old first world/third world categorisation that became popular during decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. The old version at least had the virtue of identifying the “second world”, namely the Stalinist bloc around the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba.

The environmental record of the Stalinist states, whether they had previously been imperial powers (Russia...) or subjected to conquest (China...), has been absolutely terrible. In the case of the USSR, the forced industrialisation and collectivisation begun by Stalin caused untold devastation. From Lake Baikal to Chernobyl, the environment was damaged for generations. When climate scientists began to calculate the carbon emissions by countries in the 1980s, the Stalinist states were among the worst polluters. It is not possible to redress that record by seeking out aged former Stalinist bureaucrats, or their descendants, and demanding reparations from them. Nor should we even try. Also, states which formerly came under imperial rule but became independent many decades ago, and have developed large coal, gas or oil production mostly since then, spawning ultra-wealthy ruling classes in the process — such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Gulf states, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria — continue with this production despite the now-known risks, including to their own peoples, from climate change. To demand that climate change be fixed by workers in Portugal, say, paying “reparations” to the ruling classes of Saudi Arabia or China is a dead end.

The “climate reparations” framing of demands for global justice lets the ruling classes of those states off the hook for their own culpability. These are states in which citizens often do not even get to vote for “their” governments, and where inequalities are even starker than in the old, richer states. The working classes in those states are among those impacted heavily by in the climate change which their rulers have helped generate, yet still have no part in decisions on what to produce or how to produce it.

Reparations is a transactional framing. The demand for “compensation” is about getting money from one party and handing it to another. Extracting transfers in the form of higher taxes from workers in the “West”, themselves ground down by unemployment, austerity, poverty and other blights, is not climate justice. Handing huge sums to the ruling classes of states in the “South”, with no guarantee that it will get to those who most need climate remedy, is not justice.

Reparations smack of “revanchism”, the “revenge politics” which took root in France after Prussia defeated France in war, imposed a large fine supposed to be compensation for war damage (and designed, in fact, to cripple France economically), and seized territory. The damage to France was real enough: the drive to deal with it by seeking “revenge” led to the Treaty of Versailles. To dismiss those who oppose the reparations framing as defenders of “white privilege” or “white fragility” is ad hominem demagogy, not reasoned debate.

Transitional demands

The Marxist approach to building climate campaigns is based on the historic experience of the labour movement fashioning united fronts around transitional demands. This is important because the working class is the only international agent with the interest and the power to halt dangerous climate change and build a sustainable society. The fight for a global working class-based climate movement is the central strategic intervention that could make the difference.

The demand for climate reparations attempts to find common ground with Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist campaigns. Climate activists understandably want to learn from other successful struggles, including the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements of the past. The movements formed around these struggles have much to teach, but also much to avoid. Cyril Ramaphosa was once a trade union leader in South Africa under apartheid. He then became one of the continent’s richest business people and now South African president.

The demand for climate reparations is not a transitional demand. For workers in the “North”, it is demand that they pay for damage they did not cause. For workers and peasants in the “South”, it is a nationalist demand that directs them to look for “trickle-down” from the reparations to be paid to their rulers. The demand for climate reparations divides the workers of the world, rather than unites.

The duty of Marxists in the climate movement is to tell the truth, propose the best strategies and formulate demands clearly. Demanding “climate reparations” detracts from and confuses the climate struggle. The climate movement does not need the “reparations” framing to unite for redistribution.

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