Australia is on fire. There’ve been bigger bushfires in the past, to be sure; bushfires that have killed more people or burned more hectares or done more damage. But the scale of the current crisis is hard to understate. Amidst an ongoing severe drought and the hottest December on record, most of the east coast is burning; significant towns have lost power and all connections to the outside world. Major cities from Melbourne to Brisbane are choking on ash, highways are closed and the summer tourist industry has been devastated. Canberra, which has so far been spared the fires themselves, had the worst air pollution in the world this week thanks to the ambient smoke and haze.
Regardless of whether any one extreme weather event can be proved to be caused by climate change, the 2019 bushfires foreshadow things to come. This year may (or may not) be a statistical outlier, but we know for certain that there will be more years like this - and with increasing frequency. This is not a once-in-a-generation natural disaster, it’s a generational disaster. Whatever costs the opponents of taking action on climate change imagine would come with switching to low-carbon energy generation, the cost in terms of lives, healthy, property and foregone economic activity from this year’s bushfire’s alone is almost certainly higher. The question is not, and has never been, how much will climate change will cost us - but who will pay for the sins of our past.
And here’s the bad news. I think it’s time we all finally acknowledged that green, left-liberal politics have conclusively failed to prevent or manage the crisis. We’ve spent more than a decade arguing over carbon pricing; and yet another UN climate conference (COP25) collapsed in acrimony just a few weeks ago. Sure, there are a few bright spots where having fair-minded people in positions of government or corporate power has made a difference, but it’s time to admit that more protests, more marches, and begging for more virtuous leaders is just wasting everybody’s time. For all I admire Greta Thunberg, and I really do, her style of activism offers no solution other than the failed liberal education fallacy - a giant exercise in consciousness-raising rather confronting the structural barriers to change head on.
It’s time to try something new. It’s time to try something different. It’s time to try ‘disaster socialism’.
Disaster Socialism for beginners
Most readers of a progressive persuasion are likely to be familiar with Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism’, from her seminal (and prescient) 2007 work “The Shock Doctrine”. Klein noted that capitalist structures rarely let a good disaster go to waste; that in crisis mode people will tolerate radical political and economic steps that would have previously been unthinkable or impractical; allowing conservatives to ratchet society another few steps to the right every few years. Attached as they are to norms and institutions, left-liberals appear flummoxed and ineffective. Rather than being threatened by the natural disasters which its reckless exploitation makes more likely, Klein argued that capitalism ultimately benefits from them - a thesis with terrifying implications are we face more recurrent climate change-caused disaster events. As the dirtbag left might say, if you think a political right who ignores the climate emergency is bad, just wait until you have a right-wing that recognises and responds to the threat seriously.
I would therefore offer the following working definition of disaster socialism: the practice of taking advantage of a major disasters to promote socialist policies that a population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances. It hardly needs noting that in the phenomenon of (largely volunteer) firefighters risking their lives to protect others against nature, we already have a sphere of human social and economic life in which altruistic, pro-social behaviour is the norm. Disaster socialism is not just good politics - it’s an absolute necessity to prevent the damage wrought by these bushfires being used as an excuse for further loss of community in rural Australia, the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities and the transfer of public lands into the hands of private developers.
So rather than another wasted decade attempting to legislate a carbon price from the top down, progressive parties should adopt a platform that re-orients Australian civic and economic life around the prevention, management and response to natural disasters. The sad reality is that this is a transformation that will happen to us regardless - climate change makes it so. Liberal and neoliberal politics will be unable to achieve this end without relying on increasingly militarised and authoritarian solutions. We have an opportunity here, and now, to orient our climate change adaption policies instead around spontaneous self-organisation, community solidarity and social cohesion. If you want climate action, in other words, it has to be a ‘Green New Deal’ that blends climate mitigation and adaption with socialist organising - you cannot be a green and support the maintenance of the economic status quo.
High, high hopes
What might a programme of disaster socialism look like? To begin with, I’ll note that I’m not qualified to talk about how firefighters are recruited and paid in Australia - a topic that has long been fraught with political landmines. But I will suggest that it become foundational tenet of labour law that every employee in the country - and not just federal public sector workers - be entitled to a minimum of four weeks paid leave every year to participate in firefighting or other emergency services or disaster relief public work. In this way, every employer contributes to the defence of the broader economy. We need to build-up a core of well-trained and well-equipped professional firefighters, and support them with a massive cadre of willing and able civilians. We need to have permissive social structures in place such that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men and women can mobilise themselves out of the cities to defend the countryside from disaster. Like an army reserve without the military overtones, we need to set up policies and programs that bring familiars people with the Australian demi-wilderness, teaches them how the land floods, how it burns, and how we’ll need to live as our continent continues to get hotter. Wherever possible, indigenous communities and indigenous knowledge should be involved in that effort.
We can also use disaster socialism to fund a program of massive re-investment in Australia’s rural and peri-urban communities. The reality is that the almost total urbanisation of our country is a legacy of more than half a century of underinvestment in our regions. A massive, whole-of-nation effort will be required to rebuild after each disaster, and to pre-adapt our rural towns to the threats they face, and to better connect them to national infrastructure so disasters can be responded to more effectively. Funding and workers for such efforts will in turn create a demand for more rural housing and infrastructure, leading to a virtuous cycle of development. Subsidies that make solar panels and better insulation accessible for middle-class homes in the suburbs are one thing, but public programs that make environmentally-friendly living the norm across the country should be our goal.
Disaster socialism also provides more opportunities to regulate. Acknowledging that each of these areas is politically sensitive, shifting our political narratives away from economic growth towards disaster prevention could help ease the passage of stronger regulation of land-use, the approval process for resource extraction projects and the management of water. The state needs to have an active, ongoing presence in disaster-affected communities across the country - progressives cannot become stereotyped as urban elites who descend on the regions only to protest economic developments that offend our aesthetic sensibilities - or worse, to promote mega-projects over the objections of residents. We need to work with local progressives to provide them the tools they need to manage and defend their communities on their own, from the bottom-up.
The movement in society
Finally, and I cannot emphasise this enough, we do not have to wait to capture the state to begin implementing our programme of disaster socialism. Progressive leaders have done a good job in responding to these bushfires, but I would humbly suggest that Anthony Albanese buying supplies for volunteer firefighters in his personal capacity, while good optics, is not a sufficient institutional response. The Labor Party - and other progressives parties and movements - should play leading role in connecting members in cities with disaster-affected communities, and in managing the flow of aid and volunteers. The union movement is also critical here, and I’ve actually seen the unions take a high profile role over the past several weeks in supporting their members who have been on the front line in fighting the fires.
The world is changing around us. As an Australian, you just have to open your eyes or smell the wind to see that current circumstances are not normal. To all my fellow progressives who put a higher value on the climate than on economic transformation, I would ask you this: what have you got left to lose? Social democratic government has been tried, it failed. Liberalism offers you no hope and a whole bunch of centrists are going to ultimately endorse authoritarian solutions to the climate crisis. Why not try socialism? We might fail - the scale of the problem may be too large and too complex for any conventional political movement to handle. But we have a theory of the case - that by building community solidarity we can not only respond more effectively to shared threats, but that we can also act more decisively to reform those social structures which have contributed to the current crisis in the first place.