Democracy and Global Climate Crisis: Marxian Lessons for Political Theorists

• In Event: Crises of Liberalism: From Climate Change to Democratic Retrenchment

Abstract

The specter of catastrophic global climate change along with the manifest failure of political authorities to take action to counter it has given new salience to old suspicions of democracy: that the rule of the people is too slow, too irresolute, too indecisive, or simply too beholden to the fickle, myopic mob to tackle our most serious challenges. These suspicions, formerly associated with the reactionary right, now come from across the political spectrum, and are heard from political theorists and philosophers as well as pundits and policy makers. They are met, predictably, by rejoinders that the problem lies with the defects of democracy as currently institutionalized, and so can only be addressed by more democracy.

In this presentation I argue that these debates can be usefully deepened, and many of their impasses and dead-ends avoided, by turning to a perhaps unlikely ally: Karl Marx – read not as a theorist of the economic determinism, but as a theorist and analyst of the limits of the politics. Rather than point to the inherent limitations of democracy or to its thwarted promise, throughout his career Marx suggested ways of studying how the realm of politics, including democratic politics, is conditioned by its social circumstances. In Marx’s political and historical writings, then, we find an oblique political theory, a source of principles and methods for understanding politics in terms of its limits and blockages, blind spots and occlusions.

The presentation will reconstruct the logic of Marx’s approach to the conjunctural limits of politics, then show its advantages over those commonly deployed to discuss the politics of the climate crisis. Beyond this, it will show how the light shed by this can be reciprocal: not only can Marxian insights shed critical light on the positions and assumptions of democratic theorists (philosophers, commentators, etc.), but the predicaments of the contemporary environmental crisis offer a vantage from which different Marxist lines of response emerge as more or less plausible, illuminating, and helpful.

Author

• James D. Ingram, McMaster University