Launching Facing the Apocalypse
Talks2010sAlan Thornett introducing his book Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism (Resistance Books, 2019) at its launch, a Socialist Resistance meeting on 9 April 2019, with further launches announced for Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham. The chair quotes Ian Parker calling him “the David Attenborough of British Trotskyism”. The questions and discussion that followed are a separate recording. The quotations from Marx (1844) and Engels (Dialectics of Nature) are given in their standard English wording, which is what he read. Recording on Peter Murry's YouTube channel. Transcript made from a local speech recognition of the audio supplied by the user (faster-whisper, 10 Oct 2026); the YouTube captions were unusable. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 [The chair, not named in the recording, welcomes the meeting, announces the book at a launch discount of £13.50 and further meetings in Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham, and introduces Alan:] Now, Ian Parker from Manchester made an unstudied comment, I think on Facebook, where he said that Alan Thornett is the David Attenborough of British Trotskyism. David Attenborough is not so bad as all that, although he can give ten years still to Alan or so, because he's in his nineties now. Obviously David Attenborough has never been anywhere near a factory in his life. Alan was a leading shop steward at Cowley, which was a massive car works back in the seventies, and he led many strikes there at the time. But not many car workers like Alan have actually written books of this type, as far as I know, and I think that itself is an interesting fact. And I think it also explains why Alan is able to focus on the relationship between the struggles and needs of working people and the whole ecological and environmental question. But Alan's not just a writer, apart from being a Labour activist and a socialist activist all his life. He's also been instrumental recently in setting up the Red Green Labour website and network, and I think that's an important development. [...] So without further ado, Alan's going to speak for about 30 minutes, and then there's going to be plenty of time for people to discuss.
03:39 Alan Thornett: Well, thanks everyone for coming. Well, I'm actually very critical of [myself, in the book]. [I was] in the car [industry], obviously, at that time, and I have some critique in the book [of] that. I was a part of the trade union movement: no reference, of course, to the environment. So then I was completely [locked] into growth and productivism and so on. So anyway, I'll come to that later.
04:08 I just want to say a couple of things before I start. [Ed] here is the designer of the book [cover], which is absolutely brilliant. I should say he wasn't only the designer; he made a lot of contributions and critiques of various things, for which I'm very grateful. Terry is here, who read the manuscript several times and made numerous contributions to the book. Others are not here, like Derek Wall, who read the manuscript several times and made a lot of contributions. So there were certainly a lot of people that helped in the production of the book.
04:55 It brings together a number of themes and ideas that I've been advocating over the last ten years. And because I was [a] latecomer to this, it has to be said; I started to think about [this] in the early years of the twenty-first century, and I had to do an awful lot of catching up. [inaudible] So this brings it all together in a book which I think comes together very well. One of the problems of writing it was that the situation moved so fast that a fortnight on you were already revising things: things were getting hotter, everything was happening, and it had to be continually revised. So the situation sort of impacted on the writing process itself.
06:20 I was trying to think yesterday, when I was thinking about this contribution, if I had to boil the essence of the book down to a few sentences. It is that we live in a unique time in history, where human beings have achieved total domination, where they're in a position to determine, here and now, in our lifetimes, whether life will continue on [the planet] or whether it will not. It's something that no generation has ever [faced]. And it poses a question not only to us as human beings, but it poses the question to the left, to progressive people in all their [shades], and to the revolutionary left: are they going to really seriously re-evaluate, and do something about it?
07:40 I think anybody that has read it would agree on one thing: it covers an awful lot of ground. So I'm not going to be able to cover everything in it. It set out from the start to be strategic, analytical, tactical, practical, campaigning: it tries to bring all those things together, and others will have to judge the extent to which that has been possible. It's not uncontroversial. It started out from the beginning not to remove anything because it was controversial, from the point of view that if we're going to make any impact on the course of this crisis, we're not going to do it by avoiding the hard and controversial and uncomfortable issues. That's the starting point. That's what I've tried to do.
09:04 I'm going to focus here on three themes of the book. One is the totality of the ecological crisis, and its character. Two, ecosocialism: where does it come from, what are its origins in classical Marxism? And then three, today: what should be demanded, and what should we be doing?
09:40 Firstly, on the crisis we're facing. This book doesn't deal at great length with [climate change], except that it's a huge problem, it's dangerous, it's here, and it will get worse. Glaciers are retreating, the sea ice is melting, the ice sheets are breaking up: all these things are clear. The fast track of climate change is the sea ice and the rising temperature; the much longer thing is the break-up of the ice sheets. But the reason I'm not concentrating on it is that the point I want to make is that it is far from the only existential problem the planet is facing. If climate change were resolved [tomorrow], the planet would still be in great danger. There are a series of other crises that are, in and of themselves, capable of destroying life on the planet.
11:30 So the problem is absolutely huge. I'll just mention a few of them. Fresh water, for example: we have a profound crisis of fresh water. All the fresh water that we have on the planet comes from precipitation, which is lifted up from the oceans into the atmosphere, falls as rain, and goes back down to the oceans in rivers and things like that, and it is more or less constant. What hasn't been constant is demand. Demand has gone up continuously since the onset of the industrial revolution, far beyond its replacement level, and now, for many decades, human life has been surviving on water which is pumped out of [aquifers]: geological, historical water. It has been extracted mainly for agriculture; agriculture is the biggest single user of fresh water.
12:40 And the problem with the aquifers is that not only are some of them inaccessible, some of them under deserts and very difficult to get at, but most of them are not replenishing, or if they are replenishing, they're replenishing at a fraction of the extraction rate. So the geological water is disappearing at a huge rate. When you talk about water you have to talk about cubic kilometres, and if you just take three countries, India, China and Pakistan, they have pumped out 400 cubic kilometres of underground water a year for agriculture. And the problem with water is you can't move it around very much: it is such vast quantities. And as water supplies diminish, confrontations over water, water wars and various conflicts, become more prevalent. Twenty countries get most of their water from other countries, and so they're all putting dams in different places, and taking it out here and taking it out there. The whole thing of water supply is a huge problem.
14:25 The other thing, which has been very dear to me, and which I have been writing about over the last ten years, is the crisis of biodiversity, of species extinction. When I was writing about this ten years ago, hardly anyone on the left was writing about species extinction. And yet we are facing the biggest species extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Species are disappearing at a thousand times the background rate. The background rate is that they all eventually die, but they are dying now a thousand times faster than the background rate, and it has to be tackled. This is why I am a bit reluctant to be very critical of David Attenborough, because actually he and some of the other naturalists have made a huge contribution in recent years on the issue of species extinction. Blue Planet II in particular was a game changer in understanding the impact of pollution on the planet.
15:50 Then we can come to food and agriculture; there's a major chapter on food and agriculture. I take the view that it's probably possible to produce enough food for well beyond the 7.6 billion human beings currently on the planet, probably 10 or 11 [billion]. Producing the food is not really the problem. The problem is: can you produce the food and avoid destroying the planet in the meantime? Because food production is hugely destructive. Agriculture takes 70 per cent of all fresh water, for example: corn raised to feed to cattle, and everything else. It takes 20,000 litres of fresh water to produce [a kilogram of beef]. And whatever else you say about agriculture, it is not possible to continue to eat meat at the rate it's being eaten at the present time. I'm not saying you have to become a vegan or a vegetarian, but the current rate of eating is unsustainable, completely unsustainable, particularly red meat, but also chicken. Fish, and fish farms: it's just completely unsustainable. And the future of agriculture: it's not easy to say get rid of industrial farming and go back to small farming, because then there's the question of land, to do small farming in a sustainable way. It's a really big problem, which I don't think has yet been resolved.
18:25 And then there's the issue of growth. As I've already mentioned, growth and productivism: the current world level of growth is also completely unsustainable. The world economy grows by 3 per cent every year, has done for the last 15 years, and it's likely to continue to. And this is exponential. This means that in a century, at 3 per cent a year, the economy would grow by a factor of 16. It's just completely unsustainable. I think there's more understanding on the issue of growth and degrowth now on the left than there was, but it's still quite a controversial subject on the left. It can't carry on, really. It just can't carry on.
19:40 And probably the most controversial thing the book takes up is the issue of the human population. It has been debated on the planet for 200 years, [since Malthus], and it's been debated within the framework [of the eighteenth century]. But the fact is that every year there are 70 million more people on the planet: that is the size of Germany, every year, and it has been for 50 years, with no sign of declining. And it's completely unsustainable, and we at least have to discuss on the left what to do about it, rather than just say, well, the problem doesn't exist. My opinion is that it can be resolved by empowering women to control their own lives, and that would bring it into equilibrium, in my calculation. But we just can't ignore this. Any kind of population control whatsoever should only be by consent. So these are some of the issues that go quite a long way beyond the issue of simply climate change, which is very important, has to be discussed, but can't be seen as the end of it.
21:25 Now let me go on to ecosocialism. First of all, it's the idea that the ecological crisis is now so profound in relation to the future of the planet that it determines the overall socialist project: both in terms of the way today that we fight for the socialist project, and in terms of what alternative society we as socialists are fighting for. And it changes it completely. We used to have an economically and socially just society, and everything else, but now that isn't enough. Now we have to have an economically and socially just society that is also ecologically sustainable, and can forge a new relationship with nature in such a way that it's not going to destroy itself in quite a short period of time. So the whole project has changed.
22:55 And I link it to the ecological [conceptions] of classical Marxism. What this book does is put up a vigorous defence of the ecological conceptions of classical Marxism. It's not something that I've developed; it was developed at the turn of the century by John Bellamy Foster, in his book Marx's Ecology, and others have developed it since. What it did was show that classical Marxism [was strong] in terms of sustainability and in terms of its relationship with nature. It comes in particular from Marx, who did his [thesis] on Epicureanism, which is a variant of materialism, a [sustainable] world view, and which led him then to take that further. Marx, along with Darwin, was one of the great materialists of the nineteenth century. In his interest in science he studied the work of a German agricultural chemist, Justus von Liebig, who had been developing ideas in terms of [what Marx called a] metabolic rift, which John Bellamy Foster has developed much further: basically the idea that there was a rift between the activities of human beings and the ecology of the planet, in particular the structures of the soil, and so on.
25:30 And this led, I think, to a very profound starting point. I've limited myself to just two quotes. This, for example, is Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. It's not gender-neutral language; it's 1844. "Man lives on nature, which means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature." The idea of humankind as a part of nature, in 1844: I think that's incredibly well developed. And then if you take Engels, from the Dialectics of Nature, which I think he wrote in the 1870s, he says: "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first." I think there are a lot of people today who would do well to get their heads around that.
27:15 So the point of all this, in my view, is that the starting point for an ecosocialist conception today is [the] ecological conceptions [of classical Marxism], building on those, and taking them to the point where to be an ecosocialist means that ecology is no longer a bolt-on, added-on extra to all the rest. It's something which is fundamental, integral, to all the rest. That's what I would argue is an ecosocialist.
28:00 So then, the role of the left. First of all, the role of the left in the twentieth century. I've [found] that the left had a disastrous twentieth century as far as the ecology of the planet is concerned. The gains of classical Marxism were lost in the first two or three decades of the century, and after that, whatever wing of the left you look at, ecology didn't come into it. In many cases it was argued that this is not a working-class issue, it's a middle-class issue: as if the working class don't need a planet to live on, and it's only the ruling class that needs a planet to live on. And if you look alongside that at the so-called actually existing socialism of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, the ecological record of those countries was actually worse than in these countries, in almost every case and in almost every respect: chemical lakes, black rivers, brown coal. They were ecological disaster zones, and they had an impact on the left in the rest of the world as well.
29:30 Certainly in the unions and the Labour Party, in the twentieth century, as far as I can tell, there was no break at all in terms of an understanding of the ecology of the planet. If you look back to documents like the Alternative Economic Strategy, there's not a single mention of the environment, not even a token mention, and this was a much-developed, much-vaunted strategy of the left: not a single mention of the environment, from start to finish. And we're still living in the shadow of all this today.
30:40 But what I [argue] very strongly is that, fortunately for all of us, fortunately for the planet, this was not the case with all socialists by any means. There were socialists in the twentieth century who fought against the stream, under very difficult conditions, to defend the planet, and I've mentioned a lot of them, and I've also dedicated the book to them, because of the role they were playing. Most of them were either in the USA or in Britain, to some extent in Germany, and then of course in the global South, with the indigenous movements. For example, Silent Spring, in 1962, a stunning book, took on the [chemical] agriculture [industry] and actually, in the courts, made a huge contribution. And [Marxists] in the US made huge contributions; they were then able to be part of the post-war ecology movement that began to emerge in the 1970s, and although that movement was mostly Greens and ecologists, they were able to play an important part in it as socialists and Marxists.
32:30 In Britain, we had Edward Carpenter, at the earliest stage, who fought not just for [gay] rights but, in the first two decades of the century, for an ecological understanding of the problems of the planet. Christopher Caudwell, a remarkable individual in the Communist Party, who challenged the official line of the Communist Party before he died in the Spanish Civil War. E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. These were people that did a lot of work which became groundwork for the rest of us when we started to catch up on this whole thing. OK, I've got five minutes. OK.
33:50 So, today, which is really [the point] of all this. Since I began taking an interest in these issues, I came to the conclusion that most of the strategic positions that have been taken by the left in the last 30 years, in terms of what to do about this whole process, are wrong. To start with, getting the issue of global capitalism right. First of all, it's absolutely true that global capitalism is the most destructive system from an ecological point of view. That is absolutely true. What is not true is that the human impact on the planet started with capitalism. It started a long time before capitalism. It started with the slaughter of the megafauna as modern humans moved out of Africa, and it started with agriculture and deforestation, deforestation that took place in the Neolithic period, for example. So it can't be reduced to capitalism. We can blame capitalism for a lot of things, but it can't be reduced to it, because that suggests that if you get rid of capitalism the problem is solved. Unfortunately it's not. When we do get rid of capitalism, we have a long battle in front of us to defend the planet, just against human beings. So that's the first thing.
36:00 And also, to see the abolition of global capitalism as being a viable strategy against climate change is a major problem, because we've got 12 years to go, and the trend doesn't seem to be towards the abolition of global capitalism. So what this book argues is that we want to work in a framework, in terms of saving the planet and tackling climate change, where we've got to make major changes while capitalism still exists, as part of the struggle to overcome capitalism. Because otherwise there simply is no [way]. We can't change the whole world, in terms of capitalism, in the next 12 or 20 years. It's simply not going to happen, or if it does, it's such a long shot that we shouldn't be relying on it.
37:20 And that raises the issue, then, of what we need to do today. There are a lot of things we need to do to change things very quickly. Most programmes you see to tackle climate change and environmental destruction are long-term programmes. We have got to do things in the long term, but if we've only got 12 years then it's a bit of a problem, because to do something rapidly in 12 years you need not only a long list of things to be done, but you also need big-impact ideas that can change things very quickly. And this is where I'll tackle another controversial issue on the left: that one thing we have to do to change things quickly is heavily tax the polluters. Very heavily tax the polluters.
39:00 I take the view with climate change that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest option available, they're going to be used. So one thing you have to do is make them a lot more expensive than anything else, but you also have to do it in a way that is democratic and socially acceptable, because a lot of ways of doing it would not be democratic or socially acceptable. If you did it by government dictat, for example, it would be resisted; if you rationed it, it would create a black market. So I'm very attracted towards the ideas of James Hansen, or a variant of the ideas of James Hansen, which is a fee and dividend: a tax on fossil fuels at the point of production, in which a heavy fee is levied on fossil fuels, which will increase every year, and that is then paid directly into people's bank accounts in a heavily progressive way, so that it's very popular and very acceptable, and will also bring down fossil fuel production rapidly. So I think I've probably tried to [pack] in too much, but anyway, these are some of the ideas that we need to think about.