inequalities it has magnified more urgent
- but that it has been overtaken by a
greater emergency.
Rethinking wealth, sufficiency,
poverty
The most aggressive attack on the global
Green movement is that it is a ‘luxury’
which only privilege can ‘afford’. The
implication is that the rich have more to
spend on costly ‘sustainable’ items, while
the poor depend upon the cheapest goods
mass markets can provide. This repre-
sents the opposite of what the ecological
movement means. For if limits on global
incontinence are to be set, this brings dis-
tribution back to the heart of discussion.
It is not the poor who will have to make
sacrifices. For with a more modest – not
to say rational – use of resources, both
material and human, the rich would have
to yield a great deal of their treasure and
their power, so that the poor might live
unconstrained by hunger and insecurity.
And in a globalized world, poor people
are not only the excluded of Kinshasa,
Mumbai or Manila, but also the outcasts
of the West, the rough sleepers of London
and Paris, the mentally and emotionally
sick of Chicago and St Petersburg, the
afflicted and disabled of Bengaluru and
Istanbul; just as the abusively wealthy of
the world comprise both those who flaunt
it in Jeddah or Singapore, and those who
conceal it in Frankfurt, Jersey or the
British Virgin Islands.
If we are still far from a necessary revi-
sion of the nature of wealth, sufficiency
and poverty, this is because existing poli-
ticians are animated by ideologies which
have embalmed the ritualized orthodox-
ies of political ‘reason’. ‘Electability’ is the
taboo which inhibits leadership and pre-
vents candour and an openness in those
who occupy ‘seats of governance’ or ‘high
office’, pretentious phrases that conceal
a cowering impotence. Those seeking
‘power’ must defer to a stale common
wisdom that the political parties that
developed with early industrial society
are capable of dealing with the long-term
consequences of a system, whose pro-
ductive and technological capacity was
undreamed of in the days when a hungry,
ragged population from derelict villages
migrated into the mill-towns and pit-
villages of Britain, where they found their
daily bread adulterated with chalk and
their water contaminated with typhoid.
Fear is the dominant emotion of our
generation of politicians; fear, above all,
of speaking truth to the people about the
limits of the earth which they have prom-
ised. In this context, all politics has become
conservative, susceptible in extremis to
virulent nostalgias. The conservatism of
conservative parties wants to conserve
nothing but privilege; the conservatism
of social democracy is still living off the
dwindling political capital of its some-
time opposition to laissez-faire industrial
capitalism. This is a temporary blockage,
since the social forces confronting each
other cannot be wished away or denied,
any more than the unstoppable force of
organized labour could be halted in the
early 20th century. Suppression can func-
tion only for a season, until the passions
contained burst forth once more for the
instruction and chastisement of the world.
It is not surprising that in places hith-
erto considered beacons of ‘advanced’
technological achievement, the dark
hour of millenarian reaction should
have struck: Trump in the US, Bolsonaro
in Brazil, and all the others claiming to
‘restore’ former national glory. These
crusaders of institutionalized nostalgia
are also, naturally, on the side of climate-
change deniers. They pose a challenge to
those eager to reconcile the needs of the
planet with the necessities of economics;
and the stage is set for a confrontation
between traditional ‘reactionaries’ and
‘progressives’, although both are on the
same side, in that they believe all can be
resolved within the existing paradigm.
The voices of their true opponents are
only faintly heard, since these appeal to
more modest virtues than rancid nostal-
gias of restoration. Climate change is, of
course, only one aspect of the ruinousresults of economic ‘freedoms’ which hold
humanity captive. If it has become almost
an obsession, this is because it dramatizes
the distinction between those who place
their faith in the miraculous ability of free
markets to solve moral dilemmas, and
those who believe they can ‘reform’ the
deformities of a system that claims a uni-
versality unknown since the emergence of
the great monotheistic religions.
One proud claim of politicians is that
they operate in the ‘real world’; a construct
which is actually materialized fantasy. In
their desire to outlaw alternatives, any
diversion will do. In Britain, between 2016
and 2019, the most promiscuous spillage
of money, energy, time and emotion was
wasted on the merits or failings of leaving
the European Union: no more trivial
exercise could be imagined in a wasting,
wanting world. In the US, Trump’s wall
to ‘protect’ America from lesser beings
from Central America and Mexico served
a similar purpose; while Russia’s apparent
interference in the sacrosanct US electoral
system shocked a nation that has since
1945 routinely de-selected governments
everywhere, when these have appeared
contrary to US interests.
In a world where wealth has become a
wasteful abuse of resources rather than a
noble and generous plenty, and poverty
is a starveling insufficiency rather than a
frugal restraint, a re-evaluation of politi-
cal possibilities becomes more and more
difficult. Efforts by scientists, visionaries
and radicals to alert people to the dangers
of global warming are only one frag-
ment of an epic campaign; and we have
seen how this has been overtly denied
by those who value economic ‘progress’
above planetary endurance and, covertly,
by those who would contain strategies for
survival within a global economic system
that is at war with the earth. OJEREMY SEABROOK’S MOST RECENT BOOK IS
ORPHANS: A HISTORY, (HURST, 2018). THIS ESSAY
DEALS WITH SOME THEMES HE IS WORKING ON FOR
A BOOK ON HUMAN RESOURCEFULNESS.FEATURE
One proud claim of politicians is that they
operate in the ‘real world’; a construct that is
actually materialized fantasy. In their desire to
outlaw alternatives, any diversion will do
52 NEW INTERNATIONALIST