Thursday 30 January 2025 WHO’S TO BLAME? — Panel discussion on the capitalist class, class consciousness, political alienation, greenwashing, fossil debt, accumulating wealth and systemic change
Thursday 13 February 2025 UPGRADE OR DIE? — Panel discussion on the fears of the professional class, consumer activism, carbon debt, privilege, knowledge, climate awareness and the pitfalls of technology and innovation in climate adaptation
In 1972, the now-famous report The Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome, to investigate the relationship between the exponential growth of our material consumption and its consequent impact on the environment. The report studied several scenarios set in the future, examining the future impact of resource and food consumption. Departing from the The Limits to Growth report, the 2024 year programme of RADIUS explores the relationship between economy and ecology. Through four exhibitions, a public and education programme, we aim to counterbalance the global and totalising effects of advanced capitalism as the prevailing economic system. By harnessing the propositional and imaginative capacities of artists and other stakeholders, this annual programme aims to re-evaluate notions such as value, desire, abundance and scarcity in the face of climate change and ecological degradation. How can we resist the totalising effect of capitalism and prioritise well-being over the profit motive?
The year programme concludes with the discursive public programme PARADOXES OF PLENTY, which questions if there are alternatives to capitalism, a system that promotes structural inequality and capitalises exclusively on the idea of desire as an insatiable lack. How do you ensure that wealthy people take to heart a social and political message—of scarcity and (self)imposed restraint—that is deemed disagreeable, whilst, simultaneously, the majority of the world’s population can only dream of having a larger CO2 footprint? The participants in the programme PARADOXES OF PLENTY look at this complex social issue, with a critical view of the status quo, consumer sovereignty, and a series of proposals around systemic change and desire as a form of plenitude.
British Petroleum advertisement advocating a misleading shared responsibility for carbon through the usage of a "carbon footprint," a term they coined as early as 2004.
Consumer Sovereignty
“Ecology without class struggle is gardening,” so stated Chico Mendes (1944-1988), leader of the Brazilian rural workers’ union, until he was murdered by large landowners for his activism. Precisely this class struggle seems to be the elephant in the room in the debate around the struggle needed to face and where possible mitigate negative climate change, albeit with different intensities, guises and figurations but of undiminished urgency, both here in the Netherlands and elsewhere. In the Netherlands and other similar countries in Western Europe, the discussion around class struggle in relation to climate change often seems to lapse into polarised debates and divisiveness, often characterised by a deafening silence (quietism) on the one hand and a moral-ethical disdain and diversion of guilt on the other. In this sense, class struggle—and class difference—is a sensitive topic that is often emphatically avoided in more interpersonal and intimate circumstances. Consider, for example, phenomena such as ‘flight shame’, ‘carbon guilt’ and conversations about one’s behaviour, diet and whether or not one can afford more expensive organic and sustainably sourced foods.
Against this background of guilt and quietism, it is interesting to note that the debate around climate change and class struggle seems to be conducted in advance at the level of consumers’ individual concerns and responsibilities. Consumers—explicitly not citizens—are led to believe by companies and governments that they can emancipate themselves through lifestyle choices and adjustments in consumer behavior (whilst being held responsible for carrying an immense fossil debt burden). Shifting that debt and sense of guilt—through, for instance, greenwashing media campaigns and emphasising individual responsibility through a C02 footprint (an invention of oil and gas company BP)—has real consequences that manifest themselves in the form of consumer activism or consumer sovereignty. The question remains: Are you, as an individual, actually to blame if you make choices within a system that only allows for certain choices, while, at the same time, you exercise no power anywhere over how production and material consumption is shaped? In other words, how can you live sustainably in an unsustainable system?
System change, not climate change
Alongside the notion of consumer sovereignty, there is a second position in the wider social debate on facing and mitigating anthropogenic climate change, which takes shape under the heading of systemic change. The notion of and call for systemic change is aimed at a shift in thinking about the fabric and fundamental building blocks that make up society, which is currently defined by the dominant narrative of advanced capitalism, which depletes, undermines and objectifies the environment at all costs for the sake of the profit motive and maximisation. System change advocates focus on formulating a counterpoint to this dominant narrative—that capitalists are depriving our means of survival and our planetary future—through protest, activism, legal action and pushing for a political change of direction in policy-making that revises flaws in society towards a fossil-free and sustainable living environment. This movement striving for radical systemic change has different guises and attitudes, but is generally driven by a basic attitude that emphasises scientific knowledge (and the importance of technology and innovation that stems from it).
In his book Climate Change as Class Struggle (2022), geographer Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must face up to the disproportionate effects and damage it is causing to the climate. At the same time, Huber posits that the climate movement advocating for systemic change has not yet fully matured and remains unpopular because of an entrenchment in and mobilisation from a knowledge-driven relationship to climate; a social group he describes as the ‘professional class’. Huber writes: “The professional class centers its politics not on material struggle over resources and power, but on “knowledge,” or the belief or denial of climate change itself.”
What would the climate movement look like if it focused less on knowledge but on power instead? How do you lay claim to a broader climate-consciousness—in and among different strata of the population—that associates decarbonisation with a higher standard of well-being and thus a better life?
Extinction Rebellion protest, led by the slogan "Ecology over Economy".
The rise of an ecological class
Whereas Huber talks about the importance of a proletarian ecology that is central, potentially widely-supported and emergent from labour unions, the recently deceased philosopher Bruno Latour predicted the rise of a so-called ‘ecological class’ towards the end of his life. For Latour, the rise of an ecological class is linked more than ever to a question that is about the habitability of the planet (which is being taken away from us), more than a discussion limited to production, material and the distribution of resources. The formation of local initiatives and collectives that mobilise and struggle from the bottom up is central to this, Latour argues, to resist from a localised place of belonging, moving towards politics that currently fails to create such a collective desire to collectively confront the negative impacts of climate change. Whereas the boundaries of politics always prove shiftable and elastic, the boundaries of ecosystems, on the other hand, are fixed. In this light, it is essential to think about working-class ecological politics as an effort to assert democratic control over life’s necessities. Beyond knowledge, this seems to be about the importance of solidarity across differences towards a politics of more, or, in other words, we need to formulate a more standard politics on climate change for, with and by the working class, one that appeals to everyday material concerns, as that ecology is of most primary importance to people’s livelihoods.
Art is a promise of other worlds, but it is in the real world that is actually lived by us that promises must be kept by participating in the struggles needed to transform this living world. Therefore, acknowledging that capitalism is already a global and totalising system, does not mean that no other narrative is possible. With PARADOXES OF PLENTY, RADIUS commits to an ongoing conversation about what this politics of more could entail. By reflecting on spaces that cannot be indexed on the vectors of advanced capitalism—that is, what lies outside being forced to survive through the market—RADIUS develops a programme in which art at the intersection of class struggle and climate change connects with the idea of desire as a form of plenitude (rather than desire as an insatiable lack).
Matthew T. Huber, ‘Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet’ (London: Verso, 2022), p. 5.
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Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, with contributions by Boutaina Hammana,Sergi Pera Rusca and Daan Veerman.
The RADIUS 2024 year-programme THE LIMITS TO GROWTH, of which this program is part, has been made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, Municipality of Delft, Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Stichting Zabawas, Van der Mandele Stichting, Stichting Mr. August Fentener van Vlissingen Fonds. We thank them all kindly for their support!
What would the climate movement look like if it focused less on knowledge but on power instead? How do you lay claim to a broader climate-consciousness—in and among different strata of the population—that associates decarbonisation with a higher standard of well-being and thus a better life?
