An Emerging Environmental Proletariat?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Awareness of eco-social conditions in the United States is growing as the LA wildfires spread death and destruction. This disaster, for example, comes on the heels of Hurricane Helene that tore through southern Appalachia last September. The Earth System and people are in trouble.
Weather-related loss of lives and property is fast becoming the new normal. Just ask the home insurers fleeing the Golden State’s wildfires. Profit is the motive for this move away.
Further, damaging weather events shape human consciousness. People experience and see the increasing pattern of torrential rains and raging wildfires. These disastrous changes in weather patterns are the toxic outcomes from the economics and politics of accumulating capital over every other consideration.
As wage repression the past 40 years worsens living and working conditions for the American public, a new study reveals what some call progressive views. I refer to policies and politics that favor building public health, a broad category, versus amassing wealth, the actions of monopoly corporations that dominate the economy, from Big Energy to Big Pharma and Big Tech.
“The U.S. electorate is open to policy agendas that reduce dependence on fossil fuels (e.g., through limits) while improving citizens’ quality of life. Notable examples include universal health care as a human right, accessible to everyone, regardless of employment or socioeconomic status, and reduced working hours as a tool for promoting well-being.”
Human beings and their relationship to each other and the earth are fundamental. That runs counter to the logic of a global system that is cooking the planet in carbon emissions. President Donald J. Trump captures such a drive in his phrase “drill, baby, drill,” more coarse than President Barack Obama bragging about his role in the growing excavation of fossil fuels stateside.
There’s a nascent opponent to the profit motive driving petro-capitalism. In The Dialectics of Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2024), John Bellamy Foster, an environmental sociologist, author and editor of Monthly Review, uses the following definition of who can transform the social order to improve the Earth System and people’s lives. Meet the environmental proletariat, a “revolutionary humanity based in the working population,” he writes.
Revolution is of course the normal operation for the system of global capitalism. It is constantly revolutionizing how people live and work. Look at how corporations grow our food, with toxic chemicals and pollutants, negatively impacting human health, a stark contrast to past farming practices.
On that note, the LA wildfires rage as the threat of a bird flu pandemic persists in and out of California. Agribusiness, euphemistically called the industry, is placing the public at risk of death and illness via the politics of capturing the regulatory oversight process that is necessary to protect public health. The system is designed to produce profits, not healthy humans.
Politics also happens between elections and judicial/legislative decisions. The frame of equating democracy with voting alone is past its due date. An alternative is movement politics, the enemy of the two major political parties.
Establishment politics generates an inactive citizenry. People disunited lack political power to make progressive changes. Anti-social media under the control of Big Tech amplifies that process of depoliticization, the opposite of democratization.
There are few things more difficult than working with other people towards a common purpose of equality and sustainability. Politically mobilizing and organizing tests people’s abilities and capacities to keep, to borrow an apt phrase from the black freedom movement, their eyes on the prize. Recall that the existence of chattel slavery in the U.S. was the normal of its time until it wasn’t.
Chattel slavery ended because of people’s actions. People, united, can win such major changes in the social order, once again.
As 2025 begins, the Earth System is weeping. Now is not the time to ignore that distress.
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