‘Pensions, climate: same fight!’
In theory and practice, the ongoing fight against pension cuts in France is intimately connected to ecological critiques of economic growth.
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Letting people retire is part of climate justice.
This is the thesis of ‘Retirement, a life outside capitalism,’ an article recently published by François Ruffin. The French politician and filmmaker critiques an economic logic that sacrifices both the environment and workers’ bodies on the altar of growth. ‘“Produce more, to consume more, to produce more, to consume more”: like the hamster in its cage, the planet’s heading for a wall,’ he writes. ‘And humans are being used up.’
Ruffin penned this ecological defense of retirement in response to French president Emmanuel Macron’s ongoing effort to change the country’s pension system. Put forward at the beginning of this year, the most recent version of Macron’s ‘reform’ would push the legal age of retirement in France from 62 to 64, as well as increase the amount of years citizens must work in order to receive a full pension. These proposals have inspired spectacular strikes across France, which intensified this week. Viewed from afar, such strikes might resemble those of 2019, 2010 and 1995, each a counter-offensive against a decades-long effort by France’s ruling classes to liberalize the country’s pension system. Emphasizing this repetitiveness, however, risks ignoring a novel element in the current mobilizations: namely, the increasing willingness of French militants and politicians alike to discuss the role their country’s social services will play in a society shaped by climate change.
‘Pensions, climate: same fight!’ This has been the headline of multiple articles published since the beginning of the strikes, themselves a small sampling of the volume and diversity of recent discourse connecting the defense of French pensions with the struggle for environmental justice.
Like Ruffin’s tract, these interventions contest the unfair tradeoffs demanded by the reform. Though Macron’s government has avoided any explicit connection between the two, many suspect that the president wants pension cuts to pay for France’s ‘ecological transition.’ By forcing French workers to produce more, raising the retirement age would generate tax revenue to finance the greening of France’s economy. In Le monde, philosopher Patrice Maniglier explains that such reforms would thus perpetuate an unequal society in which ‘the cost of the ecological transition will be born once more by labor.’
Beyond the injustice of this setup, Macron’s critics point to a contradiction in its basic logic, according to which production must be increased in response to ecological crisis. Within an economy whose industries still rely heavily on fossil fuels and unsustainable resource extraction, forcing people to work more amounts to accelerating the destruction of the environment. This is especially the case so long as French workers are encouraged to spend what free time and money they have purchasing ever more consumer goods. Letting the French retire earlier, meanwhile, could allow them to pursue less environmentally harmful forms of production: of personally meaningful pursuits, for example, or of social bonds within their families and communities. The only people who lose out, when this latter type of production is subsidized, are employers, widely seen as close allies to the ‘president of the rich.’
In short, for many critiquing Macron’s reform, retirement is a kind of emancipation integral to the realization of a collective and just response to climate change. From this perspective, the question for political ecology is not how to make people work more to fund a ‘green transition,’ but rather how to offer retirement to ever-wider swaths of France’s aging population.
Voices speaking on behalf of groups marginalized by France’s current pension system have clarified the ecological importance of extending, rather than retracting, retirement benefits. Publishing in L’Humanité, Marine Tondelier of France’s green party argued that the reform is particularly punitive toward women who, often burdened with domestic labor, would now stand even less of a chance of working long enough to obtain a full pension. ‘How are we supposed to be a society when society sidelines 52% of humanity?’ asks Tondelier. A similar contradiction was signaled by the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, which notes that the reforms would only add to hardships already faced by France’s farmworkers, laborers whose skills and knowledge will be essential to any long-term reorientation of French agriculture toward sustainable practices. Furthermore, many agricultural workers are migrants, often excluded from the legal labor market and thus from the pension system entirely, a situation the reform does little to address. Quoted in Les echos, political scientist François Gemenne noted that future environmental conflicts could increase immigration to wealthy nations like France. This scenario is seemingly underplayed by the most recent government publication on the pension system’s future which, over the course of its some 350 pages, contains only a single mention of ‘climate change.’
Of course, the subject of immigration in France is inseparable from the country’s colonial history. How might the ecological defense of France’s pension system account for this history, as well as the neocolonialism of its state and corporations? One response was essayed near the end of a collectively authored column in Reporterre entitled, ‘Ecologists, we must combat pension reform’:
The social safety net was strengthened in the period of postwar prosperity (1945-1975), but only by means of an unlimited exploitation of nature and other peoples—this widespread wealth, generated by economic growth, permitted the augmentation of savings and pensions. An opportunity now opens before us to rewire the safety net via connections that are more democratic, popular and ecological.
The abstractness of this language contrasts with the much more concrete arguments made elsewhere on behalf of French citizens. How to preserve France’s pension system while deconstructing its population’s ‘imperial mode of living,’ productivist or not, remains an open question.
Incomplete as they may be, the ecological critiques of Macron’s reforms are nonetheless remarkable, given how long ecology remained sidelined within debates over the future of France’s pension system. As recently as 2020, political philosopher Pierre Charbonnier could still remark on the absence of environmental considerations within these debates. In an interview published in the fall of that year, Charbonnier noted that ‘the pension system is tied up in predications of growth over multiple decades, therefore of our future capacity to produce and share wealth. It can’t be reduced to some abstract budgetary problem.’ In order to make a definitive ecological intervention in the pensions debate, Charbonnier argued, the French left had to ‘decompartmentalize ecology,’ demonstrating the connections between liberatory and environmental struggles.
As the voices evoked above illustrate, this work of ‘decompartmentalization’ is underway. Taken together, they reveal the importance of retirement—and intergenerational solidarity generally—within a just response to climate change.
Ben Beitler is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of French. He studies environmental conflict in film and literature, with a special interest in representations of expertise.