Spiked, Climate Change & E P Thompson’s Chiliasm of Despair
Spiked as some may know is a veteran opponent of climate change campaigners and its no surprise to find Michael Fitzpatrick, a name that at least a few will recall from as far back as the 1980s, writing a piece arguing that Greta Thunberg fits into the millenarian context that E P Thompson covered in the Making of the English Working Class under the words the ‘chiliasm of despair’.
Thompson was discussing early nineteenth century millenarians such as Joanna Southcott who certainly believed that the world would end, very quickly at some mostly unspecified point in the near future.
Millenarianism was a response to the upheaval that the rise of market capitalism caused in the lives of ordinary people and needs to be understood in those terms rather than viewed with what Thompson described as the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.
Thunberg is not in any case a millenarian in the sense that the argument is that the world is about to end and the only thing we can do is welcome it as a new beginning.
The point of climate change protests is that if we don’t do something about it the world will change for the worse and eventually won’t exist as we currently know it.
While Fitzpatrick takes a swipe at George Monbiot who he promotes to a Cardinal I note and Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrbortty who he berates for believing that climate change campaigners are left-wing the point surely is those who propose to do nothing about the impact capitalism is having on the environment and our daily lives are right-wing.
Fitzpatrick might also care to recall that in the preface to the Making of the English Working Class EP Thompson noted that causes and ideas that were lost and defeated in early nineteenth century England might yet be won in other times and other places.
FInally neither Spiked or Fitzpatrick appear to know that Thompson himself was an environmental campaigner. The second edition of his biography of William Morris carries an introduction by Peter Linebaugh which underlines the link between Morris’s green politics and Thompson’s own.
Linebaugh notes:
Thompson’s own powerful contribution to the discussion of food and land was made in 1972 with his article on the ‘moral economy’. It put food, not profit, as the agrarian priority. It is not a great distance of thought to go from ‘moral realism’ to ‘moral economy’. The concept, like the practice, arose ‘from below’
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