(PDF) New Climate, New Class Struggles | Nikolaj SCHULTZ - Academia.edu
https://www.academia.edu/40816830/New_Climate_New_Class_Struggles?email_work_card=view-paper
today nobody seem able to position themselves in society nor able to orient themselves on the question of class. People have lost sight of the material conditions that define them as collectives and with whom they share these conditions.
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if no one knows to what class they belong today it is because another transformation was taking place simultaneously as society became post-industrial and as the middle class arose. Much less visible but much more violent, during “les trente glorieuses", another genesis took off in the hidden, namely the “Great Acceleration”of entanglements between socio-economic trends and what the climatologists would call The Earth System.
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This simultaneous reshaping of and confusion regarding the social question became visible to all with the manifestations of the “Yellow Vests” by the end of 2019. While social scientists and political commentators were busy being lazy, juggling with one silly historical comparison after the other, what unfolded was a completely new socio-political conflict, with as little precedent in content as in aesthetical mode of representation.
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One the one hand, the manifestations finally made it clear to all Europeans that there is a direct link between the ecological mutations and social justice, between ‘the social question’ and the ‘natural question’, and that instead of opposing ecology and economy, we will have to face, theorize and organize these in the same breath. For the first time this hidden link had become so visible and so intensified that despite the modern purification of the social question, everybody could now see that it was impossible to separate it from the earthly conditions.
The public became aware that this odd amalgam of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ was if not our past, then at least our present and our future. All could see that the social question had taken on another shape and that it had become a question of a wider number of material conditions of existence than economic resources alone. Yet, what also became clear to everybody was that nobody was able to describe the material conditions of existence shaping this new class struggle, any more than a factory worker was able to describe to what class he belonged and with whom he was fighting before Marxism gave him a language that allowed him to do so.
People were blind. Or rather, people became blind. Because in the beginning of the manifestations, everybody knew very well where they were placed, to what they were attached and with whom they shared their territory – this was indeed the whole idea of the movement!
“We, these people, we live here, we need this gasoline and these highways, to reach this place in order to attend these jobs, which allows us to receive these salaries, making it possible for us to eat this food. These concrete material conditions of existence allows us to thrive, to prosper and to survive, conditions we share with these commuters (and not comrades!), making the people that disallows us to occupy this territory our enemies. We are the people of this territory; this is the class we belong to. This is what defines our position in the social landscape".
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The sooner people possess a framework that allows them to identify these conditions, the sooner they will be able to identify their position in the social landscape, their allies and antagonists and to face the injustices they are experiencing. And this is why we will have to re-describe social classes in a way that revise the Marxist definition to include a wider array of material conditions of existence that defines social collectives today and the social struggles they are fighting. A more precise description of classes and society that would allow people once again to get a grasp of the land they live off, and in continuance hereof, regain their agency and their history as political subjects.
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the goal is to help people delineate the different collectives corresponding to the climatic questions in the same way as Marx helped to delineate the collectives matching the social question in the 19th Century.
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While Eco-Marxism has been efficient in analyzing how capitalism expanded trough “The Web of Life”4, and, in doing so, how ‘The Global North’ has exploited ‘The Global South’, it strangely enough has not paid much attention to how this has metamorphosed their primary agents of history, the social classes. Even for these authors, class and class struggle remain based solely on the economy – probably because, in their final analysis, nothing really exists outside the all-encompassing web of capitalism, the system of production remaining the fundamental, non-disputable framework of thought5
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the distribution of conditions of reproduction in the processes of engendering generates clusters, clusters delineating similarities and dissimilarities between certain collectives that we would able to identify.
Thus,
by first identifying the land on which different groups live, and then reclassifying them as collectives by delineating the similarities and dissimilarities between their means of reproduction and by comparing these clusters, we would begin to see the first contours of an emerging geo-social landscape, its layers of stratification, and finally, its power structures. Because, what
such descriptions would also allow us to identify is how the mode of livelihoods of some collectives disallow the conditions of existence of other collectives to be better or worse. Hence, by identifying, reclassifying and comparing geo-social collectives we would also be able to delineate who is occupying the territory of who, or, if you prefer, who is exploiting who
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In the processes of engendering, exploitation is no longer based on the surplus value that ownership over the means of production allows some to profit from. Rather, exploitation is based on the surplus existence that some collectives’ ways of life prosper from at the expense of other collective’s possibility of occupying a habitable territory. In short, the collectives living of other peoples’ soil, disallowing other social groups to occupy a prosperous territory, the modes of livelihoods that disallows others to have access to a habitable soil9
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If such definitions seem odd or vague it is because we, at this moment, are at the very infancy of re-portraying the processes of engendering. But from the roundabouts in France to the flooded slums of Bangladesh, trough the drought hit farmers in India to the Silicon Valley billionaires buying climate-bunkers in New Zealand, people know very well that what defines their privilege and class interest is territorial conditions and that it will be so tomorrow as well. Yet, they do not have a language to articulate it.
Today, one of the most urgent tasks of social scientists becomes helping to develop this language by re-describing the material conditions of existence that allows collectives to reproduce in our New Climatic Regime10