Energy prices are the new black, part 2: energy struggles
Dear readers,
There is a war – but the central political issue in the coming years will not be "security policy" in the narrow sense, military escalation be damned.
There is a climate emergency – but the central political issue in the coming years will not be "climate policy" in the narrow sense, emergency and Paris Agreement be damned.
The central political issue in the coming years, perhaps this decade, will be energy prices. (See here (Opens in a new window) for part 1.)
Climate policy in a time of war
Whether we like it or not, whether we're pro or contra heavy weapons deliveries to Ukraine (an important dividing line in German politics): the current security-political turn (SPT, in German “Zeitenwende (Opens in a new window)”) is the reality to which all contemporary political strategies have to adapt, since it means that, counter to the hopes of many a climate activist, all political issues are nowadays discussed not from the perspective of trying to halt the climate crisis, but along the question of how they relate to the Z-fascist Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
To be sure, the SPT is being discussed quite controversially in climate circles. Some see it as a climate policy disaster, because of the discoursive shift just mentioned, but also because progressive movements and positions always have a harder time when the dominant political questions are “security” and “war”; because the SPT renders ineffective the otherwise potentially powerful framing of the climate crisis as a “climate emergency” (e.g. the portrayal of the climate crisis as a "justifying emergency" under §34 of the German Penal Code, our rhetorical escalation in response to the consistent ignorance of the climate crisis by German society; see also Antonio Guterres' (Opens in a new window) powerful speech after the publication of the most recent IPCC-report), as we now seem to live in a permanent state of military emergency; and because of the tendency towards an "all of the above (Opens in a new window)" expansion of any and all forms of energy not directly controlled by Russia, whether it's fracking in the Brandenburg Altmark, or new oil drilling in the North Sea (Opens in a new window).
Others see climate opportunities arising in this new situation: in between spouting his usual fossilistic bullshit, German finance minister Christian Lindner recently referred to renewables as "freedom energies", while vice-chancelor Robert Habeck in his alleged climate ministry (really the ministry for economic growth) has apparently ended the governmental sabotage of renewable energy expansion that has been going on for at least 15 years; in an interesting echo of the arguments made by the Green New Deal Group (Opens in a new window) in 2008, it is now a war that for the 1st time since probably the 1970s makes energy-saving and other, let's call them “discourses of frugality” relevant again (the most widely noted example of this is probably the revival of Japan's "Setsuden (Opens in a new window)" campaign, which led to significant energy savings after the Fukushima disaster; see also Draghi's clever question: "do you want air conditioners or peace? (Opens in a new window)"); and lastly, the war in Ukraine finally drives home to the German public the destruction that comes with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Sure, Russian gas is being replaced by gas from Qatar, not exactly a paladin of human rights either, but the "fossil fuels suck, and make us dependent on actors we'd rather not be"-frame could never have been established as powerfully by the climate movement alone, if it hadn't been in the context of the SPT.
On balance, I tend to share position 1 - that the SPT marks a significant setback for the climate movement, for climate policy, and for the climate discourse in general – but it's actually not a terribly relevant question. Recall that in my narrative, the climate movement has so far remained irrelevant to the question of sustainable emissions reductions, as indeed has the “climate policy”-field; and secondly, the SPT does not really care what we climate-folks think about it, it is an "event" (Badiou), a rupture within reality, which creates new truths, and brings forth new actors who defend and implement these truths. It is a change of world-historical dimensions, and will have consequences that we cannot possibly anticipate today.
Climate strategy in a time of war
But the fact that climate policy in the narrower sense is hardly a winner in the SPT - because it is simply not the dominant sign under which day-to-day politics must explain itself - does not mean that we can thus stop developing climate strategies in the context of the SPT. What resources do we have at our disposal for this?
2 weeks ago, I suggested that energy policy and energy prices ("cost of living (Opens in a new window)") are among the absolute hot button issues in national political struggles currently taking place. There are a number of reasons for this that remain to be analyzed, but one of the most important is the fact that energy policy and -prices play a central role both in the new "master frame" (the SPT) and in the almost-master-frame “climate emergency” pushed by the climate movement.
For example: to push for lower natural gas prices is to accept of a greater degree of dependence on Russia, unless there's a massive push for the development of LNG infrastructure, which would constitute a "fossil fuel lock-in (Opens in a new window)"; while those who actively push for independence from Russian gas supply and want to prevent the construction of new gas infrastructure in turn implicitly accept higher gas prices. (btw, I'm not necessarily talking about consumer prices here, but about market prices - the consumer price of any form of energy is highly politically regulated, there can be a huge gap between market and consumer prices, and there is a huge set of laws, regulations and societal priorities standing in between the two).
That is to say that below the obviously security- and war-related questions like the one about heavy arms deliveries to Ukraine lies the question “what will the energy system of the future look like?”, a question that is being hotly contested. In contrast to the climate field, where a small, radical minority is battling the ever-acaptive sublimation-mechanisms operated by societal majorities in the global north (cf. here (Opens in a new window) and here (Opens in a new window)), in the struggle over the future energy system we find a much more complex strategic situation, There exists in Germany, for example, a "green capital fraction (Opens in a new window)", which organizes itself in the usual corporatist federations and associations; there is a variety of movements (anti-coal, climate, anti-car, pro-bike...) that are actively fighting the fossil-nuclear system. This opens up possibilities for alliances that are not available to a climate (justice) movement pure and simple.
Energy struggles in a time of war
For now, that should suffice to explain why, for the time being, I'm moving away from climate struggles in the narrow sense towards a focus on energy struggles (Opens in a new window). energy struggles – that is, social struggles over the control of, the access to, and the price of energy – have always been, and increasingly are, at the core of social conflicts around distribution and ecology, modes of production and modes of life. The history of all hitherto existing society is also the history of energy struggles, because “every form of energy implies a particular organization of work (Opens in a new window)” and a particular social division of labour. The centrality of energy struggles in the social balance of power is easily explained: energy is an extremely profitable good because all production and reproduction depend on it. Energy is a potential. In everyday life it means being able to move from A to B, to heat the apartment or make coffee. For capitalist businesses, it is the potential to make human labour more efficient or even replace it. For governments, it is the ability to deploy troops abroad, or to forge social compromises through the targeted reduction/increase of heating costs. Energy plays a central role in social struggles: because it can make human labour more efficient, it is indispensable for increasing relative surplus value (as opposed to increasing absolute surplus value by lengthening the working day). Control over energy therefore represents a crucial power resource in labour and class struggles.
This analysis of course applies to any 'phase of capitalist development' (whether Fordism or post-Fordism, the era of high imperialism, or of neo-colonialism), but I would argue that energy struggles will be of even greater importance in the coming phase of capitalism – let's provisionally call it “post-earth capitalism (Opens in a new window)” or more precisely, that energy prices will constitute the central field of struggle, because: In every phase of capitalist development, there is a central social variable that is an expression of the dominant social relation (labor relation, money relation, or society-nature relation); influences more than others the distribution of social surplus value; and whose 'correct' setting plays a central role in the constitution of social coalitions.
There are three "factors of production" in a capitalist econony: land (nature), labour, and capital. In each "phase of capitalist development" one of these factors is the "dominant" one. Dominant here means that the regulation of this factor has a central influence on the constitution of social coalitions, and that shifting this variable is a key way to influence the societal distribution of surplus value. For heuristic and strategic purposes, these factors can be reduced to one central variable: Wages (=price of labour); interest rates = price of money; energy price = as the best proxy indicator for the price of “land”, aka nature, because energy commodities are, on the one hand, the most profitable of all primary commodities, and, on the other hand, the transformation of any commodity into goods requires, is based on energy. Thus energy prices = price of nature.
And this is the core of my argument: no matter how long the war in Ukraine and the wars that might follow will last, no matter exactly how fast the climate crisis will escalate, of the three factors of production mentioned above, only one will be truly scarce in capitalism's post-earth-phase: nature, and the price of nature will be expressed most closely in energy prices. Energy prices will thus be the location where crucial social decisions will be taken, and will express themselves in.
To bring this already pretty long text to an at least provisional end (until part 3 comes out in 2 weeks): climate strategy in the SPT will need to include a strong focus energy prices. They are one of the central political battlegrounds of any future that lies ahead of us. And these futures care about as little what we think of them as the SPT does. They will come. We must be prepared.
Either way: enjoy your week.
Your friend &/or comrade
Tadzio
