Since climate protests first hit front pages across Europe around two years ago, the question of reconciling social and environmental justice has gone increasingly mainstream. Many on the left rightly point out that transition to a green economy must simultaneously tackle inequality (an idea to which even organisations like the OECD now pay lip service[1]), not least because the climate crisis is largely the result of systemic disparities in levels of resource consumption. Two protest movements emerged in France and the UK respectively in Autumn 2018 that seemingly have very little in common: the gilets jaunes and Extinction Rebellion. Despite their obvious differences, these movements converge where they call attention to a key issue, that of class in green politics. Together, they point to how we might add some detail to the basic idea that climate change and social inequality must be tackled in union.
The gilets jaunes took to the streets in October 2018 in protest against a fuel tax increase and a reduction in the speed limit to 80 kph on larger roads, measures designed to limit and mitigate private car use. The gilets have since become France’s longest running protest movement since the Second World War, evolving into a broadly anti-capitalist attack on inequality, neoliberal globalisation, closure of public services, and the lack of democratic accountability in the person and office of the President. Their demographic is largely white, non-unionised working-class and lower middle-class people living in peri-urban or rural areas, many of whom have been affected by underemployment and casualisation, often pushed out of urban areas by rising property prices. Gilets jaunes are likely to be on the political left, but this is by no means a rule, organising themselves via social media independently of parties or unions. In the early phases, many French commentators focused on the movement as a tax revolt, comparing the gilets jaunes to anti-fiscal protests of the past. Judging from these comparisons and the trigger for their protests, the gilets jaunes might seem an unlikely ally for environmental movements.
In fact, the image of the gilets jaunes as a latter-day rural mob, addicted to fast driving and fossil fuels, turned out to be misleading. Despite the apparent contradiction, a number of gilets jaunes are far more engaged in climate politics than has been sometimes been acknowledged, especially in the UK press. While some saw the gilets jaunes as a symptom of the environmental movement’s ‘class problem’ – showing how working-class people had rejected environmentalism as something the elite attempted to impose on them[2]– gilets jaunes themselves were turning out for climate marches, carrying slogans such as ‘end of the world, end of the month, same struggle’ and ‘plus de banquise, moins de banquiers’ (‘more sea ice, fewer bankers’).[3]The former is a reference to the words of the then-environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, who asked whether it was better to get to the end of the month or avert the end of the world.[4]Many environmentalists in France said that it should be possible to do both.
The gilets jaunes rejected a specific approach to the climate which sees our current crisis as a failure of the market that can be corrected in the market, in line with other policies to price carbon. With regressive taxes like Macron’s fuel levy, the lower your income, the greater proportion of it you spend on running your car (and on basic energy costs in general), and so the harder the burden falls for doing the same action of driving a car. Even worse, revenue from the tax was not even guaranteed to be spent on renewable energy and decarbonisation. In a video from March last year, Priscillia Ludosky, whose own petition started the protests against the fuel tax increase, joins figures including the leader of CFDT (one of France’s major trade union confederations) in calling for higher taxes on corporate polluters, lower VAT on public transport, more help for insulating households, and divestment from fossil fuels.[5]She emphasises that the most economically vulnerable will suffer most from climate breakdown. In the other direction, Europe, Ecologie, Les Verts (France’s green party) reached out to the gilets jaunes, calling for 10 ‘propositions “gilets jaunes et verts”’ including investing 30 billion euros in public transport, reinvesting ecological taxes, fighting tax evasion and producing fiscal justice, ending the closure of public services, and creating a circular economy to end wastage.[6]One manifesto issued by the gilets jaunes themselves calls for a huge range of ecological policies from a new aviation fuel tax to promoting rail freight.[7]In opposition to the image of a nostalgic movement of disaffected working people unable or unwilling to change their lifestyles, polls suggest that 85% of ‘lower professional categories’ (encompassing most gilets jaunes) are worried about global warming, and 70% of the same category said they would consider using public transport, cycling, or walking more often.[8]This is significant among people for whom car use does not feel like much of a choice, constrained by post-war, car-centric suburban planning and cuts to public services. For all the talk last year in France of the ‘yellow-green’ alliance, the priority for many gilets jaunes does remain raising their living standards. But increasingly, their debate has addressed the question of equitable decarbonisation, no longer seen as an afterthought to the issue of social justice.
In the UK, environmentalism has long been disparaged as the preserve of the white middle-classes, and this was especially true when Extinction Rebellion (XR) came to prominence around the same time in 2018. Without perpetuating the lazy stereotype that all XR protestors are middle-class crusties, it is clear that the movement still faces obstacles in terms of diverse engagement, something that many of its own members would be the first to acknowledge. The prime example of this was perhaps the notorious Canning Town tube action which, though disavowed by XR, betrayed in its timing and location a lack of awareness of the lives of working-class and BME commuters. XR activists tend to stress the vulnerability of the world’s poorest to climate change, and have established an international solidarity network aimed at providing financial support to activists in the Global South, but they have been criticised for failing to listen to minorities even within their own movement at home.[9]As Jeremy Harding notes, XR began as a small group of white people from Stroud in Gloucestershire, and has since grown very rapidly: asking it to mobilise the masses might be a tall order for a group that until recently had little social base from which to do so.[10]
Where the gilets jaunes began as a mass movement that subsequently incorporated debates on the climate, Extinction Rebellion faces the opposite problem of transforming a radical ecological agenda into a mass movement. On the one hand, many of XR’s protest tactics have been highly effective at addressing the paradoxes of scale and issues of communication that all environmental movements must face. It’s very difficult to bring consumers to a recognition of our impact on the climate. The greater the number of people engage in a consumer activity, the less the responsibility of each individual for the destruction caused, and yet the greater the cumulative impact. Reducing individual consumption to ‘save the earth’ can seem like a ridiculous fantasy of agency, and especially to those who already limit their consumption because financially they cannot afford not to. XR’s tactics work to disrupt ‘business as usual’ – gridlocking traffic, for example – in effective ways that connect potentially abstract scientific issues with tangible reality, and employing imagery that foregrounds our place within the biosphere.
On the other hand, discourses of sacrifice, minimalism, and apocalypse that are prevalent in XR present an obstacle to cross-class engagement. These surface in XR’s much-discussed arrest strategy, its focus on existential threat, and the exemplary lower-carbon lifestyles of many activists: all understandable tactics, but ones which can alienate as well as call attention to the urgency of our situation. By contrast, certain gilets jaunes have had success in placing social justice at the centre of ecological debates. Movements that can talk about day-to-day self-interest and the interests of the climate in the same breath, as some gilets jaunes do, tend to be able to mobilise a greater diversity of people and so are more effective. Many XR activists are focused on gaining the support of the 3.5%, the supposed proportion of the population needed for a civil disobedience movement to achieve its aims. Others rightly stress the necessity to not totally alienate the rest of the population in the process.
Attitudes to consumption are key to determining the diversity and degree of support for environmental movements. To mitigate the effects of climate change, we must see net degrowth in the long term, which will mean setting more restricted criteria for what we consider to be materially ‘enough’ to lead fulfilled lives. But this does not need to be expressed in terms of self-sacrifice.[11]The climate protest movement must be careful not to echo the language of the neoliberal ‘green austerity’ policies that so angered the gilets jaunes in France and have been imposed on the poorest in the UK over the last two decades by Conservative and Labour governments alike.[12]They must be clear that a green transition will involve radically redistributing wealth. As George Monbiot points out, we have a choice between ‘public luxury for all, or private luxury for some’; in the future we can’t have private swimming pools, but we can all have access to a public swimming pool that’s free at the point of use.[13]The vision for a different economy of public luxury would come first in a climate movement with mass appeal. Despite the gilets jaunes’ many contradictions, their movement indicates the popularity of policies to tackle climate change that focus on changing our modes of consumption, but are expressed as redistribution rather than sacrifice.
If the climate movement has faced difficulties engaging cross-class support, the movement needs to not only to learn to engage working-class support, but also needs to consider the current emergence of new social classes. Bruno Latour argues that in the past decades we have lacked a ‘civil society’ that would provide the legitimacy for states to make the kind of large-scale interventions to tackle climate change that they have made recently to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. ‘If I talk to you about wind turbines, abortion, permaculture, red meat, aviation, mass tourism,’ he says in a recent interview, ‘you will take different positions to your neighbours, without the alignment of positions that we could generally find in the socialist description of social classes.’[14]Latour proposes the concept of ‘geo-social class’, a double definition of class which adds a new layer on top of the classic Marxist one, the criterion of the territoire that we depend on to consume our necessary resources.[15]Where Marx had the system of production to organise class differences, we now need to think in terms of a system of engendrement– of our ‘being produced’ as humans – that defines the entities which allow us to live: that is to say, the land, water, and air that make up our local yet interconnected segment of the biosphere.[16]To illustrate this, Latour gives an extreme example of a geo-social elite, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs buying land in New Zealand because they expect it to be less affected by climate change. Their privilege is a combination of wealth and mobility that allows them to segregate themselves from the rest of society and attempt to monopolise ‘territorial’ resources. By contrast, we might see the peri-urban gilets jaunes (and their socio-economic equivalents in the UK) as both socially and ‘territorially’ underprivileged, at least by European standards, people who feel their mobility (in multiple senses) is threatened and whose protests appropriately included stopping traffic at roundabouts, obstructing toll booths, and blocking airports.
Working-class environmental movements have long understood Latour’s idea of geo-social class first-hand. Movements such as the ‘environmental justice’ movement in the US in the 1980s, or in the UK the mass trespass on Kinder Scout for the right to ramble in 1932, or more recently the Lancashire anti-fracking protestswere primarily struggles for a safe, habitable local environment. They were led by communities that have experienced the conjunction of class and/or race discrimination with environmental segregation and degradation by corporate interests as a daily reality. Today, we are all facing the threat of losing a habitable environment. The criticism that climate politics is somehow a selfless-yet-indulgent activity is no longer tenable, because social-environmental issues are becoming ones of immediate self-interest for more and more people, as they have long been for underprivileged groups like those just mentioned. This is something that current movements like XR can draw on to their benefit, learning from past protests that connected a social group with a threatened environment in a tangible way.
The evident differences and surprising common cause between the gilets jaunes and climate protestors in the UK suggest that a successful climate movement must articulate the interests of underprivileged geo-social classes. The gilets jaunes’ seemingly paradoxical support for ecological policies shows that climate interest is, and should be expressed as, a matter of immediate self-interest. Their movement hardly presents a coherent set of proposals, but at very least it shows that working and lower-middle class Europeans are ready to support a radical ecological agenda when this is combined with a plan for redistributive social justice. Needless to say, the kind of economic transition envisioned in proposals for a Green New Deal will require widespread support from the public. Climate protest movements like XR understandably speak of our need for a habitable planet as universal, a condition of human existence that is seriously threatened. But it is equally if not more important to speak of the redistribution of wealth away from today’s over-consumers that will not just be complementary, but necessary, to mitigating climate catastrophe. In doing so, climate protestors address the critical debate on consumption in a way that does not alienate working-class support, but engages cross-class involvement in envisioning a green economy and collectively deciding what we consider materially ‘enough’.
[1]http://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/GGSD_2018_Summary%20Report_WEB.pdf
[2]Hattie O’Brien, ‘Does the environmental movement have a class problem?’, New Statesman, Oct. 19. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/environment/2019/10/does-environmental-movement-have-class-problem
[3]Natalie Sauer, ‘‘We were ecologists before the capitalists’: the gilets jaunes and climate justice’, The Ecologist, Mar. 19. https://theecologist.org/2019/mar/25/we-were-ecologists-capitalists
[4]Jeremy Harding, ‘Among the gilets jaunes,’ London Review of Books, Mar. 19.
[5]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEnclxmsCZo
[6]https://eelv.fr/gilets-jaunes-et-verts-2/
[7]https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20181129.OBS6307/gilets-jaunes-on-a-decortique-chacune-des-42-revendications-du-mouvement.html
[8]‘ « Balises d’opinion » #42 : Les Français et le réchauffement climatique’, Ifop-Fiducial pour CNews et Sud Radio, Oct. 18. https://www.ifop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/115209-Rapport-CN-SR-42.pdf
[9]Jeremy Harding, ‘The Arrestables’, London Review of Books, Apr. 2020.
[10]Ibid.
[11]Karen Bell, ‘Building a working-class environmental movement’, Green World, Nov. 19. https://greenworld.org.uk/article/building-working-class-environmental-movement
[12]Lisa Nandy, ‘The climate protest movement must not alienate Britain’s working classes’, The Guardian, Oct. 19. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/02/climate-protest-alienate-britains-working-classes-extinction-rebellion
[13]George Monbiot, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/31/private-wealth-labour-common-space
[14]Bruno Latour interviewed in Libération. https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2020/05/13/face-a-la-crise-ecologique-nous-avons-fait-exactement-ce-qu-il-ne-faut-pas-faire_1788277
[15]Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, ‘A Conversation with Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz: Reassembling the Geo-Social’. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276419867468.
[16]Ibid.